The asteroid that happened at the end of the Mesozoic period may have killed almost all large animals on Earth, yet its evidence is mostly gone. But sometimes geologists track it down.
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
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About 66,000,000 years ago an asteroid we nicknamed Chicxulub hit what we now call the Gulf of Mexico. And it was one big bang. The asteroid had a size of about 10 – 15 kilometers and a volume of about 2,600 cubic kilometers. Most likely, its composition was similar to chondrite so its mass was likely about 8,000,000,000,000 tons. The impact created a crater with a diameter of 200 kilometers and was the major cause for the extinction event closest to our own time.
It was truly a devastating time. Literal Hell on Earth. But it happened a long time ago. So long ago that is actually hard to find remains of this ancient global tragedy. We have some evidence – like dust that fell across the Earth or evidence of fires up to 1,500 kilometers away from the impact zone.
Yesterday in geological terms, in 2019 in North Dakota – about 3,000 kilometers away from the impact zone we discovered fossil remains with materials that were mixed by the megatsunami caused by the asteroid’s impact. Some models actually tell us the initial tsunami wave was up to 1.5 kilometers tall. And it took a good amount of time for the sea to calm down and “smaller” tsunamis were constantly hitting the coasts.
Now, recently in human terms, geophysicist Gary Kinsland and his coworkers from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette discovered evidence of these megatsunami waves that are literally fossilized in buried in sediments in today’s central Louisiana. More than 10 years ago Kinsland got seismic data of this area from the company Devon Energy. Miners were searching the area for fossil fuels and thus gathered a lot of data they shared with scientists. And while the current sea levels are low, when the Mesozoic period was coming to an end Louisiana actually was a shallow sea. The extreme tsunami caused by Chicxulub caused monumental warping on what back then was the seafloor.
These waves are up to 16 meters tall and spaced up to a kilometer apart. The researchers discovered at a depth of roughly 1.5 kilometers under the current terrain level. That depth corresponds to the end of the Mesozoic and the time of the impact. And even the orientation of these warps nicely corresponds to the dramatic impactful origin.
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