Asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs caused a global tsunami of 1,500 meters

The big asteroid that fell to Earth about 66 million years ago and was instrumental in the extinction of nearly all dinosaurs and about three-quarters of all animal and plant species, caused an initial towering tsunami one and a half kilometers (1,500 meters) high that traveled thousands of kilometers in almost all the oceans of the planet, American and other scientists estimate.

The asteroid, named after Chicxulub, was estimated to be 10 to 14 kilometers in diameter and slammed into our planet at a speed of 12 kilometers per second. It crashed in the region of present-day Yucatan in Mexico into a granitic crust overlying thick layers of sediments and shallow seawater, opening a crater about 100 kilometers in diameter and spewing massive amounts of dense clouds of dust and soot into the atmosphere.

Researchers estimate that the initial energy of the tsunami was 30,000 times greater than the energy of the deadly and destructive tsunami (one of the largest in modern history) that was triggered in December 2004 by an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean, killing more than 230,000 people.

The researchers from the US, New Zealand and Ghana, led by Molly Range of the University of Michigan, who made the relevant publication in the journal “AGU Advances” of the American Geophysical Union, base their estimates on a new computational model, the which they fed with all the available geological and oceanographic data from about 100 regions of the Earth.

The modeling study concluded – based on relevant simulations – that two and a half minutes after the impact, a towering wall of water 4.5 kilometers high rose from the impact site, which quickly receded. But ten minutes after the impact and up to 220 kilometers away a 1.5 kilometer high tsunami wave began to sweep the ocean in all directions.

An hour after the asteroid hit, it is estimated that the tsunami had already spread out of the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic. Four hours later, the waves, traveling at an undersea speed of 20 centimeters per second, had reached the Pacific Ocean, and after 24 hours, having crossed most of the Pacific from the east and the Atlantic from the west, they had now entered the Indian Ocean Ocean on both sides of it.

Finally, after 48 hours, tsunamis several meters high had hit most of the planet’s coastlines, flooding and eroding them.

It should be noted that, as the new model estimates, the relatively closed sea of ​​today’s Mediterranean avoided the strongest consequences of the tsunami.

RES-EMP

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