The asteroid created an epic tsunami. The highest wave rose to a height of 4.5 kilometers
The impact of an asteroid in the area of today’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago changed the planet forever. In addition to climate change, it probably caused the largest tsunami in Earth’s history.
In a study published Tuesday in the journal AGU advances, scientists concluded that a tsunami caused by an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous geological period hit half of the Earth. Its highest waves reached a height of several kilometers.
Additionally, the asteroid spewed huge amounts of dust and ash into the atmosphere, triggering climate change and global darkness. This event led 66 million years ago to the extinction of three-quarters of the species at that time, including flightless dinosaurs (of the dinosaurs only flying species survived, from which today’s birds evolved).
Tsunami read from sediments
Scientists from hundreds of sites in different regions of the planet have studied sediments that belong to the period immediately following the impact of the asteroid. They then created a computer simulation of the waves from the collected data.
In the simulation, they assumed it The Earth was hit by a space rock with a diameter of 14 kilometers, which reached a speed of 43,000 kilometers per hour before impactwhich is 35 times the speed of sound.
Their model suggested that the energy released by the impact of the space object and the tsunami was 30,000 times greater than that of the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed 230,000 people.
Once the asteroid hit Earth, it created a crater 100 kilometers across and spewed a dense cloud of dust and soot into the atmosphere. Two and a half minutes after impact, the curtain of ejected material pushed out a wall of water, creating a 4.5 kilometer high wave.that rolled around.
Ten minutes after the impact and 220 kilometers from it, the wave rose to a height of 1.5 kilometers. An hour later the tsunami reached the North Atlantic. In another three hours it crossed the sea between North and South America and reached the Pacific.
Image showing the spread of a tsunami following the impact of a comet in the area of the current Gulf of Mexico. | source: credit-Range et al.
Twenty-four hours after the asteroid hit, the waves swept most of the Pacific and Atlantic, entering the Indian Ocean from both sides. And within forty-eight hours of the fatal collision, they hit most of the planet’s shores.
The wave traveled 12,000 kilometers
The science team even found out traces of the tsunami to New Zealand – at a distance of more than 12 thousand kilometers from the impact of the asteroid on Earth. Originally, researchers believed that the rock deposits there came from local tectonic activity.
Only the South Atlantic, the northern part of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and where the Mediterranean Sea has now escaped the tsunami.
“This tsunami was powerful enough to destroy and erode sediments in ocean basins that cover fifty percent of the globe,” cites the magazine. Live science lead author of the Molly Range study at the University of Michigan.
