A NEWLY discovered field of craters has given scientists the opportunity to study a celestial event never before observed on Earth.
Around 280million years ago, a meteorite smashed into Earth with enough size and speed to send massive chunks of bedrock flying into the air.
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The bedrock came crashing back down to Earth and scattered over 100 miles away from the impact site.
Though secondary crater fields are common on the Moon and other planets, this represents the first discovery of a secondary crater field on Earth.
Researchers first thought that the craters had been created by a crumbling asteroid that broke up before impact with the Earth’s surface.
When studying the craters, scientists noticed an absence of elements or metals alien to the area–which would be the case in the event of an asteroid’s collision with Earth.
The shape of some of the secondary craters was another clue that the initial hypothesis was wrong.
The boulders came crashing back into the Earth and left a field of elliptical-shaped craters as opposed to circular ones.
Like paint flicked from a brush, the elliptical tails pointed back to a single impact site in a “radial pattern”.
“The trajectories indicate a single source and show that the craters were formed by ejected blocks from a large primary crater,” geologist and lead researcher Thomas Kenkmann said in a report on the findings.
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The report stated that the research team drew on similarities observed in the secondary crater field scattered around the famous Tycho crater on the surface of the Moon.
Scientists deduced that the impact site of the large asteroid that caused this cosmic chaos is somewhere almost two miles beneath the Wyoming-Nebraska border.
Researchers dubbed the field the “Wyoming impact crater field”.
They theorize the crater would be 31 to 40 miles in diameter, if they could find it buried beneath sediments.
Science.org reports that the shock wave created by the impact would have killed anything within roughly 250 miles of ground zero.
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs came almost 200million years later and landed on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
This month, an asteroid nearly a mile wide zoomed past the Earth, closely averting a potentially global crisis.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
