Tuesday, October 11, 2022

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

  • One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

  • Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

  • Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

  • By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

1 comment:

  1. It was a comet. So it would have come with a lot of shrapnel. A lot of small rocks as well.

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