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Odd Impact Crater found in the North Sea

Posted by michael on from the cosmic-billiards dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Just noticed this on MSNBC. It seems they discovered an impact crater in the North Sea that doesn't look like anything else seen on Earth. Supposedly it looks like something usually seen on moons of Jupiter."

4 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what's the difference between what's seen on by silicon_synapse · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Its the concentric circles around the crater that set this one apart from other eathly craters. They still aren't convinced that an asteroid impact could create a crater like that but may rather have been caused by "an up-from-below phenomenon known as salt diapirism."

  2. Multiple impacts? by Mestophiles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could the extra rings be caused by multiple impacts?

  3. One In A Billion by panthro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Stewart said that if Silverpit was created 60 million years ago, there wouldn't be any cause to link the two impacts. "On the other hand, if it came out at 65 million years ago, we would have the possibility that Silverpit was in fact a fragment of Chicxulub [...]"

    IANAG(eologist). It seems to me, though, that if Silverpit was a fragment of Chicxulub, it would have to have hit the surface of the earth within a matter of hours as the part that hit near the Yucatan. They speak in the article of pinning the time frame down to 65 million years ago, and I'm assuming give or take half a million. With the information I have at hand, Chicxulub and Silverpit could have been up to a million years apart. Do you know what a million years is, in hours? About 8.76 billion. That's a pretty big margin of error! I don't think we should get our hopes up about the multi-dinosaur-killing-meteorites thing despite all its appeal, unless there is some other more substantial reason to believe these two meteorites had anything to do with one another. After all, a lot of meteorites hit the earth every million years.

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  4. Article lacks details by LagDemon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think this is a great article and all, and it raises some neat issues (maybe the catastrophe that killed the dinosaurs was a meteor storm, not just one meteor, or something), but no where in the article did it say WHY it looked like something from one of Jupiter's moons. Does anyone know why this is?

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