The crater dates to around 66 million years ago, but may or may not have been related to the dino-killing impact.
The new crater was formed very close in time to the Chicxulub impact, raising the possibility that the two may be related. When Uisdean Nicholson, a geologist at Heriot Watt University in the U.K., and his team started poring through seismic data from the West Coast of Africa, they weren't looking for signs of space rocks.
The formation of the Nadir impact crater, which would have been accompanied by magnitude-7 earthquakes and enormous tsunami waves. Despite this short-term devastation, Kring said, marine life would have likely rebounded quickly. In a similar marine crater, now on dry land in Nevada, researchers have found that the sediments right on top of the crater show colonization by new life shortly after the impact, he said.
It's tough to say. The seismic data allow Nicholson and his team to estimate the new crater's age to within only about 800,000 years, so it's possible that the impacts occurred quite far apart in time and had nothing to do with each other. Because craters on Earth are so often eroded or destroyed by tectonics, it's easy to forget that impacts are relatively common, geologically speaking, Kring said.
There are a couple of scenarios in which the Chicxulub crater and the Nadir crater could be connected, however. The dinosaur-killing asteroid may have broken up near Earth and could have hit the planet in a couple of volleys, hours or a few days apart, Nicholson said. Or, the two space rocks could have been from the same parent asteroid that broke apart in the asteroid belt and pummeled Earth with a cluster of impacts over a million or a couple of million years.
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