A new study shows that an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago caused a giant wave in the Gulf of Mexico.
The huge waves after the asteroid's impact in Mexico's Yucatn Peninsula were discovered by researchers after analyzing cores from more than 100 sites around the world.
The study's lead author, Molly Range, said in a statement that the wave was strong enough to cause damage to ocean basins halfway around the world.
The research on the mile-high wave was published in the journal AGU Advances.
There is a question about whether an asteroid could destroy Earth.
Immediately after the asteroid's collision, Range dove into the ocean. Based on earlier findings, her team modeled an asteroid that traveled 8.7 miles across and was speeding through the air at over 30,000 mph, 35 times the speed of sound.
Three-quarters of all plants and animal species were wiped out after the asteroid hit.
Many of the asteroid's effects, such as sparking raging fires that cooked animals alive and pulverizing sulfur-rich rocks that led to lethal acid rain, are well known by researchers.
To learn more about the mass extinction event, Range and her colleagues analyzed the Earth's geology, analyzing 120 "boundary sections," which were laid down just before or after the event.
The model of wave height and travel predicted the boundary sections.
The researchers found that the initial energy from the impact was up to 30,000 times larger than the initial energy from the Indian Ocean earthquake.
The asteroid kicked up a dense cloud of dust and soot after hitting the Earth.
According to the simulation, just 2.5 minutes after the strike, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water out to sea.
The wave swept through the gulf in all directions at the 10 minute mark. The wave left the Gulf of Mexico and headed into the North Atlantic.
The Central American Seaway, which separated North from South America at the time, was the location of the first wave.
After the asteroid hit, the waves traveled through most of the Pacific and Atlantic, entering the Indian Ocean from both sides, and touching most of the globe's coastlines 48 hours later.
There are asteroids under Louisiana.
After the impact, the waves traveled mostly to the east and northeast and flowed into the North Atlantic and South Pacific oceans.
The water traveled so fast in these areas that it can erode the seafloor's fine- grained sediments.
The water speeds in these areas were not as fast as they could have been.
The team found outcrops on eastern New Zealand's north and south islands, a distance of more than 7,000 miles from the crater in Mexico.
Scientists thought the outcrops were caused by local activity. The study's researchers pinned it to the asteroid's huge waves because of their age and location.
The most telling confirmation of the global significance of the event is that these deposits are recording the effects.
While the models didn't assess coastal flooding, they did reveal that open ocean waves in the Gulf of Mexico would have reached heights of more than 100 m.
Waves would have risen quickly as the water became shallow.
Most coastal regions would be eroded to some degree depending on the geometries of the coast. It pales in comparison to the global impact of the waves.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
