Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Was So Large It Caused A Global Tsunami
By Bill Galluccio
October 5, 2022
A team of researchers from the University of Michigan revealed shocking new data about the damage caused by the city-sized asteroid that slammed into Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The asteroid, which was about 8.7 miles wide, created a 62-mile crater and caused a global tsunami that circled the entire planet in just two days.
"The impact tsunami was up to 30,000 times more energetic than the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record," the researchers wrote in the journal American Geophysical Union Advances.
As the massive tsunami surged around the globe, it stirred up ocean sediment over 6,200 miles from the impact site in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for her master's thesis.