Dinosaurs were killed not by one asteroid, but by two - scientists spoke about a new find

At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa, researchers discovered traces of the fall of a large asteroid - Nadir crater. It formed about 66 million years ago, at the same time the famous Chicxulub formed in the Yucatan region, the appearance of which is associated with the extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Nadir was discovered during seismic sounding. The crater is located under a 900-meter water column and a 400-meter layer of bottom sediments, 400 km from the coast of Guinea. An elliptical depression with a diameter of 8.5 km and a depth of about 40 meters. The deformation model of the ocean floor hints that it was formed as a result of the fall of a very large object.

Scientists suspect that the asteroid crashed into an ancient hill: this is indicated by traces of scattered rock and a raised floor at the supposed center of impact. The exact information whether such a relief appeared due to the fall of an asteroid will be shown by practical expertise: in the near future scientists hope to analyze the crater's rocks to find traces of high temperatures or samples of extraterrestrial origin.

A computer model of events estimated the impact power at least 5,000 Mt in TNT equivalent - for an explosion of such force, an asteroid with a radius of about 10 km had to crash into the Earth's surface. Such a collision could cause earthquakes with a magnitude of at least seven points and multiple tsunamis.

Scientists have not come to a unanimous conclusion about what exactly happened more than 60 million years ago. Some of them believe that the craters Nadir and Chicxulub were formed as a result of the fall of several fragments of one large asteroid. There is also an opinion that the reliefs were formed with a difference of millions of years due to the fall of space objects at different times. Nevertheless, no one doubts that these events are associated with the mass extinction of living organisms at the end of the Cretaceous period.