A nearly 540-foot-wide asteroid crashed into the North Sea, only 80 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire… 43 million years ago.
The immense space rock (or possibly a cosmic-sized snowball called a comet) caused a mammoth, 330-foot-high tsunami.
This impact left behind a two-mile-wide gash known as the Silverpit crater, named after a nearby sea-floor channel.
The crater was discovered by British oil geologists in 2002, hidden beneath 700 metres of oceanic ooze and debris.
Its origin has long puzzled scientists, with experts suggesting it was caused by underground salt shifting about, making the seabed collapse.
But scientists have found the ‘needle in the haystack’ proof that it was the result of an asteroid about the size of York Minster.
Dr Uisdean Nicholson, a sedimentologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, used seismic images to dive deep into the giant gash.
He found that around the crater, which stretches over 12 miles in a series of concentric rings, were ‘shocked’ quartz and feldspar crystals.
These minerals are only formed under the immense pressure of asteroid strikes, the findings, published in Nature Communications, say.
‘These prove the impact crater hypothesis beyond doubt, because they have a fabric that can only be created by extreme shock pressures,’ Dr Nicholson said.
‘Within minutes, it created a 1.5km high curtain of rock and water that then collapsed into the sea, creating a tsunami over 100 metres high.’
‘It is very rewarding to have finally found the silver bullet’
Professor Gareth Collins, of Imperial College London, who provided numerical models for the study, said a gigantic rock from outer space smashing into the Earth was the ‘simplest explanation’ for Silverpit.
‘It is very rewarding to have finally found the silver bullet,’ he said.
‘We can now get on with the exciting job of using the amazing new data to learn more about how impacts shape planets below the surface, which is really hard to do on other planets.’
Silverpit crater is one of 200 confirmed impact sites in the world, most of which haven’t been fully dated.
While this sounds like a lot, the Earth has been struck by a fair few intruders over the millions of years the planet has been around.
Almost all evidence of these impacts, however, has been swept under the rug by earthquakes and erosion that constantly renew the seabed.
‘We can use these findings to understand how asteroid impacts shaped our planet throughout history, as well as predict what could happen should we have an asteroid collision in future,’ added Dr Nicholson.
Others include Chicxulub, a 110-mile-wide crater buried under the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula, thought to have been caused by an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.
Its explosive force, akin to a hundred million hydrogen bombs, would have ignited firestorms and choked the Earth with dust. Causing the global extinction of not only dinosaurs but plants, fish and plankton.
Or, rather, it was one of a swarm of asteroids that set this extinction in motion.
Other craters, such as Boltysh in Ukraine, have been dated to around the same time as Chicxulub, may also have caused fiery cataclysms and bad news for any living thing nearby.
Together, this may have been a one-two punch that made the dinosaurs’ luck finally run out.
Humanity has yet to face such an event, but came close-ish in 2024 when a ‘city-killer’ asteroid was seemingly hurtling towards us.
The rock, called 2024 YR4, had a 3.1% chance of colliding with the Earth on December 22, 2032, Nasa briefly suspected last year.
Early estimates of the asteroid’s path show it would have slammed into or exploded over highly-populated areas like Mumbai, India or Bogotá, Lagos.
These days, though, space officials say it’s just 0.00081%, or roughly one in 123,000 chance.
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