Huge asteroid dubbed ‘dinosaur killer’s cousin’ as new 8.5km crater discovered
Scientists have found a new crater thought to have been caused by an asteroid that hit the earth around the same time as the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
The 8.5km cavity is thought to have been caused by a space rock, dubbed the "Dinosaur Killer's Cousin", of about half a kilometre in diameter.
The impressive discovery was made more than 300m below the seabed and about 400km off the coast of Guinea, west Africa.
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Dr Uisdean Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University has more scientifically named the unprecedented discovery the "Nadir Crater".
"These surveys are kind of like an ultrasound of Earth," he told BBC news.
"I‘ve spent probably the last 20 years interpreting them, but I’ve never seen anything like this.
"Nadir‘s shape is diagnostic of an asteroid impact. It’s got a raised rim surrounding a central uplift area, and then layers of debris that extend outwards."
The asteroid that scientists believe did wipe out the dinosaurs hit the earth at what is now the Gulf of Mexico, creating the Chicxulub Crater.
This much crater, estimated to be 12km in length, created a 200km-wide depression in the surface of the earth, and in the process is thought to have set fire to a significant percentage of the planet, sparked earth tremors and tsunamis, and changed the course of the earth's history by wiping out the dinosaurs that inhabited our world.
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While the Nadir asteroid would have been approximately ten million times smaller, its impact would still have been important.
Dr Veronica Bray of the University of Arizona said: "Our simulations suggest this crater was caused by the collision of a 400m-wide asteroid in 500-800m of water.
"This would have generated a tsunami over one kilometre high, as well as an earthquake of Magnitude 6.5 or so.
"The energy released would have been around 1,000 times greater than that from the January 2022 eruption and tsunami in Tonga."
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