An Mysterious Object Has Carved an 8km Wide Crater into Earth’s Surface and May Be a “Accomplice” to Chicxulub.
According to The Guardian, traces of an extraterrestrial object found on the seabed off the coast of Guinea in West Africa could be evidence suggesting that the extinction event that dinosaurs faced 66 million years ago was not solely caused by the Chicxulub “killer.”
The Nadir Impact Crater may be evidence of an “accomplice” to the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs on Earth – (Illustration AI: ANH THƯ).
About 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid named Chicxulub struck Earth with the force equivalent to approximately 1 million atomic bombs, triggering a series of catastrophic events that ended the “Age of Monsters” on our planet.
The evidence of this event is a crater located on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Now, scientists have made a startling discovery: Radiocarbon dating of the crater, which has a diameter of up to 8 km off the coast of West Africa, indicates it appeared around 65-67 million years ago.
Calculations show that it is the remnant of an asteroid more than 400 meters in diameter, which barreled toward Earth at a speed of over 72,420 km/h.
Dr. Uisdean Nicholson, a marine geologist at Heriot-Watt University (UK) and the lead author of the study on the crater named Nadir, stated that scientists discovered the impact crater using 3D maps created from seismic waves.
Results indicate that besides its massive diameter, the crater is also 300 meters deep.
These details suggest that the impact, while “weaker” than the Chicxulub disaster, was powerful enough to cause severe tremors that liquefied sediments beneath the ocean floor, forming new faults.
This terrifying event also triggered landslides, with traces of damage visible over thousands of square miles surrounding the impact crater.
From there, a “monster” tsunami over 800 meters high formed and swept across the Atlantic Ocean.
A significant amount of greenhouse gases was also abruptly released into the atmosphere during this chain of disasters.
In an article published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment, researchers expressed their suspicion that this space rock is a “sibling” of Chicxulub.
It is possible that both objects were separated from a common “parent body”, a large asteroid that broke apart into many pieces on its way to Earth.
