Karmactive Team
After decades of debate, scientists have finally proven that a mysterious structure beneath the North Sea was created by an asteroid strike. The Silverpit crater, located about 80 miles off Yorkshire’s coast, formed when a massive space rock slammed into Earth around 43 million years ago.
A research team led by Dr. Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University used advanced seismic imaging, microscopic analysis, and computer models to settle the long-running scientific argument that began when the crater was first discovered in 2002.
“New seismic imaging has given us an unprecedented look at the crater,” explains Dr. Nicholson. “Samples from an oil well in the area also revealed rare ‘shocked’ quartz and feldspar crystals at the same depth as the crater floor.”
These minerals proved crucial to solving the mystery. The crystals show distinctive patterns that only form under the extreme pressures created by asteroid impacts – what Nicholson calls “a real needle-in-a-haystack effort” to discover.
The 3-kilometer-wide crater sits 700 meters below the seabed and is surrounded by a 20-kilometer ring of circular faults. For years, some scientists argued it was created by moving salt layers deep underground or by volcanic activity.
This changed dramatically when researchers discovered that a 160-meter-wide asteroid – about the size of a large football stadium – hit the seabed at a low angle from the west. The collision created a 1.5-kilometer-high curtain of rock and water that collapsed into the sea, triggering a tsunami over 100 meters tall.
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Dr. Tom Dunkley Jones from the University of Birmingham, who helped date the impact, said: “Studying the fossil remains of microscopic plankton now preserved in sub-sea sediments at the same level as the crater has shown that this catastrophic event happened in a narrow time window in the middle Eocene epoch.”
The confirmation places Silverpit among Earth’s rare impact sites. While approximately 200 impact craters have been identified on land, only about 33 have been found beneath oceans – making this discovery particularly valuable to scientists.
Professor Gareth Collins from Imperial College London, who contributed computer models to the research, said: “I always thought that the impact hypothesis was the simplest explanation and most consistent with the observations. It is very rewarding to have finally found the silver bullet.”
The discovery ends a scientific controversy that peaked in 2009, when the Geological Society held a debate where most geologists voted against the asteroid impact theory. The new evidence, published in the journal Nature Communications, has completely reversed this position.
This well-preserved crater now provides scientists with a unique opportunity to better understand how asteroid impacts have shaped Earth throughout history and could help predict what might happen during future asteroid collisions.
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and involved scientists from Heriot-Watt University, Imperial College London, and the University of Birmingham.
