The Impact
If one assumes the meteor impact theory is right, the size of the crater can be combined with assumptions about the speed of an impacting object to estimate the size of the impactor itself. Impacting objects are generally moving at speeds of the order of 20–50 km/s, and at these speeds an object about 120 m (393 feet) across and with a mass of 2.0×109 kg would be required to form a Silverpit-sized crater, if the object was rocky. If it had been a comet, the crater would have been larger.
For comparison, the object which struck the Earth at Chicxulub is estimated to have measured approximately 9.6 km (6 miles) across, while the object responsible for the Tunguska event in 1908 is thought to have been a comet or asteroid about 60 m (196 feet) across, with a mass of about 4×108 kg.
An object 120 m (393 feet) across smashing into the sea at many kilometers per second would generate enormous tsunamis. Scientists are currently searching for any evidence of large tsunamis in the surrounding areas dating from around that time, but no such evidence has been uncovered yet.
Read more about this topic: Silverpit Crater
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)