Big Bang in Antarctica
Imagine Earth being hit with a force so hard that it kills most of the planet's animals and breaks continents apart.
With the discovery of a 300-mile-wide crater in Antarctica--hidden beneath more than a mile of ice--Ohio State scientists believe they've found evidence of that scenario.
 |
Professor Ralph Von Frese and researcher Laramie Potts, both in geological sciences, say the meteor that hit 250 million years ago was much larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Von Frese and Potts led an international team that discovered the crater in Wilkes Land, a region of East Antarctica south of Australia.
Its impact may have caused the tectonic shift that pushed Australia northward in the break-up of the Gondwana supercontinent.
The crater is more than twice the size of the impact left by the meteor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs--and von Frese and Potts say the immediate effect of the impact was huge.
It may have caused the biggest mass extinction in the world's history, they say, paving the way for the dinosaurs to rise to prominence.
"All the environmental changes that would have resulted from the impact would have created a highly caustic environment that was really hard to endure," von Frese said. "So it makes sense that a lot of life went extinct at that time."
(Excerpted from an Ohio State Research News story by Pam Frost Gorder. Read the full story.)
Related links:
