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Extraterrestrial impacts

The big splash

Nature volume 390, pages 340–341 (1997)Cite this article

Seventy per cent of the Earth is covered with sea water, and most of that is ocean, so most of the large asteroids and comets striking the planet should hit deep water. But very little remains of these impacts — virtually all evidence of large impacts, in the form of craters and associated debris, is found on land. On page 357of this issue1, Gersonde et al. describe the evidence for and consequences of the impact of an asteroid, 1-4 km in diameter, in a 5,000-m-deep ocean basin, 1,500 km southwest of Chile. The asteroid hit the Earth in the late Pliocene, some 2.15 million years ago.

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Figure 1: The largest unmelted remnant of the Eltanin meteorite recovered by FS Polarstern It is a fragment of mesosiderite, a rare class of differentiated, stony-iron meteorite, and comes from core PS2708-1 (that drilled at intermediate depth; see Fig. 3 on page 359).

References

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  6. Smit, J. et al. . in The Cretaceous-Tertiary Event and Other Catastrophes in Earth History (eds Ryder, G., Fastovski, D. & Gartner, S.) 151-182 (Geol. Soc. Am., Boulder, CO, 1996).

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  1. the Research School of Sedimentary Geology, Institute of Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit de Boelelaan 1085, Amsterdam, 1081, HV, The Netherlands

    Jan Smit

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Smit, J. The big splash. Nature 390, 340–341 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/36993

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