Vast Asteroid Crater Found In Timor Sea 121
An anonymous reader notes the discovery of a 35-million-year-old impact crater in the Timor Sea, northwest of Australia, which helped to usher in a period of significant global cooling. "The new findings, announced today and published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, suggest that the impact could have contributed towards the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet... The minimum size of the dome, which 'represents elastic rebound doming of the Earth crust triggered by the impact' is 50 km across, but the full size of the crater could be significantly larger, [lead researcher Andrew Glikson] told Australian Geographic. 'It would be possibly 100 km.' From the probable diameter of the crater, Andrew estimates that the asteroid which struck the Timor Sea was between 5 and 10 km in size. This impact coincided with a time of heavy asteroid bombardment globally. Several other craters have been documented from a similar time, including one off the WA coast measuring 120 km in diameter. Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size."
An asteroid 100km across? Err , I don't think so (Score:2, Informative)
Something that large hitting the earth would evaporate most of the oceans and turn a large proportion of the earths surface molten. If it didn't kill off life entirely it would certainly kill off almost all multicellular organisms and reset the evolutionary clock so an impact like that could not have happened in the last 600 million years at least.
Re:An asteroid 100km across? Err , I don't think s (Score:3, Informative)
Rock 5-10km, crater 50-100km (Score:4, Informative)
Read the article. The crater is 10x the size of the rock.
Re:An asteroid 100km across? Err , I don't think s (Score:4, Informative)
Reading is fundamental....
The minimum size of the dome, which 'represents elastic rebound doming of the Earth crust triggered by the impact' is 50 km across, but the full size of the crater could be significantly larger, [lead researcher Andrew Glikson] told Australian Geographic. 'It would be possibly 100 km.'
Andrew estimates that the asteroid which struck the Timor Sea was between 5 and 10 km in size.
Re:An asteroid 100km across? Err , I don't think s (Score:5, Informative)
From what I could quickly find, the Popigai Crater in Siberia is 100km in diameter, but that doesn't mean that whatever created it was 100km in size.
For those wondering what it would be like . . . (Score:1, Informative)
to be standing 1000km away when an 8km asteroid hits the Timor Sea in an are with a depth of 1000m here is a neat link:
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=1000&distanceUnits=1&diam=8&diameterUnits=2&pdens=3500&pdens_select=0&vel=20&velocityUnits=1&theta=65&tdens=1000&wdepth=1000&wdepthUnits=1
If you want to play with the inputs, here is the source site:
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
Re:Coordinates (Score:4, Informative)