Impact Events

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Impact events, proposed as causes of mass extinction, are when the planet is struck by a comet or meteor large enough to create a huge shock wave felt around the globe. Widespread dust and debris rain down, disrupting the climate and causing extinction on a global, rather than local, scale. The demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous has been linked to an impact that left a crater in the seabed off the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Impacts have also been blamed for other mass extinctions, but the timing and links between cause and effect for these is still debated by scientists.

Chicxulub crater

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named. It was formed by a large asteroid or comet at least 10 kilometres (6 miles) in diameter, the Chicxulub impactor, striking the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), around 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth suddenly became extinct, including the dinosaurs. The crater is more than 180 kilometers (110 miles) in diameter and 20 km (12 mi) in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 km depth. It makes the feature the third of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.

Location of Chicxulub crater, Mexico

The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater and gave up his search. Later, through contact with Alan Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the impact origin of the crater includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.

In 2016, a scientific drilling project drilled deep into the peak ring of the impact crater, hundreds of meters below the current sea floor, to obtain rock core samples from the impact itself. The discoveries were widely seen as confirming current theories related to both the crater impact and its effects.

Imaging from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission STS-99 reveals part of the 180 km (110 mi) diameter ring of the crater. The numerous cenotes (sinkholes) clustered around the trough of the crater suggest a prehistoric oceanic basin in the depression left by the impact.

In 1978, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo were working for the Mexican state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán Peninsula. Penfield's job was to use geophysical data to scout possible locations for oil drilling. In the offshore magnetic data, Penfield noted anomalies whose depth he estimated, and mapped. He then obtained onshore gravity data from the 1940s. According to Penfield, "The old data showed a large concentric set of onshore gravity anomalies. When I laid it next to my No. 2 pencil mapping of the offshore magnetic anomalies, the fit was perfect: a shallow, 180-kilometer diameter gravity-magnetic bullseye on the almost non-magnetic, uniform carbonate background of the Yucatan platform! We recognized the crater as the likely Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary event." A decade earlier, the same map suggested an impact feature to contractor Robert Baltosser, but he was forbidden to publicize his conclusion by Pemex corporate policy of the time.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow dated tektite samples from the impact as 66,038,000 ± 11,000 years old.

The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11–81 kilometers (6.8–50.3 mi), and delivered an estimated energy of 21–921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs. For comparison, this is ~100 million times the energy released by the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device ("H-bomb") that remains the most powerful man-made explosive ever detonated, which released 210 petajoules or 50 megatons TNT). The impact created a hole 100 kilometers (62 mi) wide and 30 kilometers (19 mi) deep, leaving a crater mainly under the sea and covered by 600 meters (2,000 ft) of sediment by the 21st century.

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact area. The coastline is shown as a white line. A series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. White dots represent cenotes (water-filled sinkholes). A ring of cenotes is associated with the largest semicircular feature, although its exact origin remains unclear.

In their 1991 paper, Hildebrand, Penfield and company described the geology and composition of the impact feature. The rocks above the impact feature are layers of marl and limestone reaching to a depth of almost 1,000 m (3,300 ft). These rocks date back as far as the Paleocene. Below these layers lie more than 500 m (1,600 ft) of andesite glass and breccia. These andesitic igneous rocks were only found within the supposed impact feature, as is shocked quartz. The K–Pg boundary inside the feature is depressed to 600 to 1,100 m (2,000 to 3,600 ft) compared with the normal depth of about 500 m (1,600 ft) measured 5 km (3 mi) away from the impact feature.

Along the edge of the crater are clusters of cenotes or sinkholes, which suggest that there was a water basin inside the feature during the Neogene period, after the impact. The groundwater of such a basin would have dissolved the limestone and created the caves and cenotes beneath the surface. The paper also noted that the crater seemed to be a good candidate source for the tektites reported at Haiti.

Astronomical origin of asteroid

In September 2007, a report published in Nature proposed an origin for the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater. The authors, William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlický, and David Nesvorný, argued that a collision in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago resulted in the Baptistina family of asteroids, the largest surviving member of which is 298 Baptistina. They proposed that the "Chicxulub asteroid" was also a member of this group. The connection between Chicxulub and Baptistina is supported by the large amount of carbonaceous material present in microscopic fragments of the impactor, suggesting the impactor was a member of a rare class of asteroids called carbonaceous chondrites, like Baptistina. According to Bottke, the Chicxulub impactor was a fragment of a much larger parent body about 170 km (106 mi) across, with the other impacting body being around 60 km (37 mi) in diameter.

In 2011, new data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer revised the date of the collision which created the Baptistina family to about 80 million years ago. This makes an asteroid from this family highly improbable to be the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater, as typically the process of resonance and collision of an asteroid takes many tens of millions of years. In 2010, another hypothesis was offered which implicated the newly discovered asteroid P/2010 A2, a member of the Flora family of asteroids, as a possible remnant cohort of the K/Pg impactor.

The center of the crater is near the village of Chicxulub Puerto, Yucatán.

Multiple impact hypothesis

In recent years, several other craters of around the same age as Chicxulub have been discovered, all between latitudes 20°N and 70°N. Examples include the disputed Silverpit crater in the North Sea, and the Boltysh crater in Ukraine. Both are much smaller than Chicxulub, but are likely to have been caused by objects many tens of meters across striking the Earth. This has led to the hypothesis that the Chicxulub impact may have been only one of several impacts that happened nearly at the same time. Another possible crater thought to have been formed at the same time is the larger Shiva crater, though the structure's status as an impact crater is contested.

The collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 demonstrated that gravitational interactions can fragment a comet, giving rise to many impacts over a period of a few days if the comet should collide with a planet. Comets undergo gravitational interactions with the gas giants, and similar disruptions and collisions are very likely to have occurred in the past. This scenario may have occurred on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, though Shiva and the Chicxulub craters might have been formed 300,000 years apart.

In late 2006, Ken MacLeod, a geology professor from the University of Missouri, completed an analysis of sediment below the ocean's surface, bolstering the single-impact theory. MacLeod conducted his analysis approximately 4,500 kilometers (2,800 mi) from the Chicxulub crater to control for possible changes in soil composition at the impact site, while still close enough to be affected by the impact. The analysis revealed there was only one layer of impact debris in the sediment, which indicated there was only one impact. Multiple-impact proponents such as Gerta Keller regard the results as "rather hyper-inflated" and do not agree with the conclusion of MacLeod's analysis, arguing that there might only be gaps of hours to days between impacts in a multiple-impact scenario (cf. Shoemaker-Levy 9) which would not leave a detectable gap in deposits.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org