Some 66 million years ago, a huge space rock about the size of Manhattan slammed into Earth near the Yucatan peninsula. The enormous asteroid sent huge blasts of dust and waves rippling across the planet and wiped out up to 75 percent of life, including dinosaurs.
Now, scientist say they have found evidence of the resulting giant tsunami that swamped much of the Earth. In a study published in the journal Earth & Planetary Science Letters, researchers report how they discovered 52-foot-tall “megaripples” nearly a mile below the surface of what is now central Louisiana.
“These megaripple features have average wavelengths of 600 meters (1,968.5 feet) and average wave heights of 16 meters (almost 52.5 feet) making them the largest ripples documented on Earth.”
(...) Kinsland is convinced these fossilized remains were left behind by the megaripples as they neared what was then the coastline. At the time, the area was about 200 feet below the surface of the ocean, he tells Akila Raghavan of Science Magazine.
“The water was so deep that once the tsunami had quit, regular storm waves couldn’t disturb what was down there,” Kinsland says.
Kinsland and his colleagues selected central Louisiana as a search site because that’s where they suspected the shoreline was 66 million years ago, a time when water levels were much higher. The dinosaur-killing asteroid left a nearly 100-mile wide crater on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, near the modern community of Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula, reports Tessa Koumoundouros for ScienceAlert.
The researchers determined the megaripples corresponded accurately to the crater in the Gulf of Mexico. The circumferences of the geologic features in Louisiana match up with the impact site, Kinsland tells Raghavan.
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