I am a fan of dinosaurs. I am also deeply appreciative of the fact that their extinction made it possible for evolution to get to the point that I can be here to tell you about how I like dinosaurs.

Geologically, our world has a layer of dying-off dinosaurs capped by a layer of iridium that indicates that something from space self-destructed on the surface of Earth and threw all the iridium into our atmosphere where it settled like a marker saying “Here be Asteroid Debris”.

As the story goes, in the 1970s, petroleum engineers on the lookout for oil found a super weird geological anomaly on the Yucatan peninsula that ended up associated with a crater impact in the 1990s. The size, age, and other features are all consistent with this crater being the crater formed by a dino-killing space rock.

But what if it didn’t work alone?

A newly discovered 8.5-kilometer potential crater has been found under the sea floor off the coast of West Africa. This work is described in a new paper in Science Advances that is led by Uisdean Nicholson. The crater appears to be the right age, and if this situation is correctly understood, it could be that two fragments from the same object hit us, or that this was just a freak accident with two rocks getting us in their sights at the same time.

More research and potentially difficult digs under the ocean are going to be needed to fully understand this discovery. Whatever happened, I love that there are still big things to discover hidden on our world.

More Information

Not one, but two asteroids might have slain the dinosaurs (Science News)

“The Nadir Crater offshore West Africa: A candidate Cretaceous-Paleogene impact structure,” Uisdean Nicholson, Veronica J. Bray, Sean P.S. Gulick, and Benedict Aduomahor, 2022 August 17, Science Advances