According to the Daily Express, a cosmic impact off the Yorkshire coastline sent a mega-tsunami taller than Big Ben crashing across the ancient North Sea. Scientists have finally confirmed the impact after two decades of dispute, as reported by the Daily Express. A 160-metre-wide space rock ploughed into what is now the southern North Sea roughly 40 million years ago, gouging out a concealed crater and generating a wave exceeding 100 metres (330ft) in height, the Daily Express states.
The Silverpit structure is a rare, exceptionally well-preserved impact crater buried 700 metres beneath the seabed and approximately 80 miles off the coastline, Science Daily reports. Shocked minerals and state-of-the-art seismic scans leave 'no doubt' that Silverpit is an impact crater, according to Science Daily. The findings, published in Nature Communications, overturn years of scepticism, the Daily Express notes.
Geologists first identified Silverpit's distinctive bullseye pattern in 2002 — a three-kilometre-wide crater encircled by circular faults extending roughly 20km, the Daily Express says. Experts have been divided on the cause: asteroid strike, shifting underground salt, or volcanic collapse, as reported by the Daily Express. In 2009, a room full of scientists voted against the asteroid theory, the Daily Express states.
These prove the impact crater hypothesis beyond doubt.
The latest evidence has swept aside all remaining doubts, according to the Daily Express. Dr Uisdean Nicholson, from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, spearheaded the research, the Daily Express reports. Researchers combined cutting-edge seismic imaging with samples retrieved from an offshore oil well, the Daily Express says.
Buried at the base of the crater floor, researchers uncovered ultra-rare 'shocked' quartz and feldspar — microscopic crystals bearing the scars of pressures so tremendous they can only be produced by violent impacts, the Daily Express states. 5-kilometre-high wall of seawater and pulverised rock skyward within minutes, the Daily Express reports. As that towering column collapsed, it unleashed an enormous tsunami across the region — a prehistoric behemoth wave that would have utterly dwarfed any modern storm surge, the Daily Express says.
Prof Gareth Collins of Imperial College London participated in the 2009 debate and contributed to the research, according to the Daily Express. The exact date or geological timeframe of the asteroid impact remains uncertain, and the specific environmental or ecological consequences of the tsunami are not detailed in the findings. Further research is planned to study the Silverpit crater and its implications for geological models of the North Sea region.