Nadir, as the African crater with a diameter of at least 8.5 kilometers was named, is buried under 300 to 400 meters thick sediments on the seabed, at a sea depth of 900 meters
British and American scientists have found, through the analysis of seismic data, off the coast of West Africa, solid evidence for the existence of a possible large underwater asteroid impact crater.
The researchers, led by assistant professor of geosciences, Wisdin Nicholsonof Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, who made the relevant publication in the journal “Science Advances”estimate that the crater has a similar age of 66 million years to the famous and much larger 200 km diameter Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, which has been linked to the impact of a large 10 to 12 km diameter asteroid that led to the mass extinction of non-human primates. flying dinosaurs (as well as three-quarters of all plant and animal species) at the end of the geological Cretaceous Period.
THE Nadir – as the African crater with a diameter of at least 8.5 kilometers was named – is buried under sediments 300 to 400 meters thick on the seabed, at a sea depth of 900 meters, at a distance of about 400 km from the coast of Guinea in West Africa. Scientists do not rule out that the two craters – Chixulub and Nadir – are connected.
If it is confirmed that Nadir was created by an asteroid impact, the researchers think it is possible that there was originally a larger parent asteroid, which as it fell to Earth broke up in the atmosphere into smaller pieces, large enough to cause cataclysmic disasters. Alternatively, there may have originally been two separate asteroids—or even more whose craters have not yet been found—that fell within close proximity of each other.
Seismic analysis and subsequent modeling lead to an estimate that the asteroid had a diameter of about 400 meters and would have fallen – with a force equivalent to a 5,000 megaton TNT explosion – into a sea that would have been 800 meters deep, successively causing a huge tsunami up to a kilometer high, an earthquake of 6.5 to 7 degrees and possibly releasing significant amounts of greenhouse gases from seabed carbon deposits.
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