Posted on 10/15/2009 10:07:58 AM PDT by decimon
Boulder, CO, USA -- A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.
Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
“If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet,” Chatterjee said. “A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics.”
By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa.
The geological evidence is dramatic. Shiva's outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 kilometers in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as the Bombay High, which would be 3 miles tall from the ocean floor (about the height of Mount McKinley). Most of the crater lies submerged on India's continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs. The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India.
The team hopes to go India later this year to examine rocks drill from the center of the putative crater for clues that would prove the strange basin was formed by a gigantic impact.
“Rocks from the bottom of the crater will tell us the telltale sign of the impact event from shattered and melted target rocks. And we want to see if there are breccias, shocked quartz, and an iridium anomaly,” Chatterjee said. Asteroids are rich in iridium, and such anomalies are thought of as the fingerprint of an impact. **WHEN & WHERE**
The significance of the contemporaneous Shiva impact structure and Deccan volcanism at the KT boundary Sunday, 18 October 2009, 3:45-4:00 p.m. Oregon Convention Center, Portland Ballroom 256
View abstract, at http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009AM/finalprogram/abstract_160197.htm. **CONTACT INFORMATION**
For on-site assistance during the 2009 Annual Meeting, 18-21 October, contact Christa Stratton in the Newsroom (7:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m. PDT), Oregon Convention Center, Room D133, +1-503-963-5708.
After the meeting contact: Sankar Chatterjee Geosciences, Texas Tech University MS Box 41053 Lubbock, Texas 79409-3191, USA +1-806-794-3287
The reason it may be exaggerated as to size is to try to bring the Deccan Traps into the 21st century as a mechanism for extinction.
i read the bible its all i need.
Utter and complete BS. EVERY bit of scientific evidence proves an old Earth and universe, from Astrophysics to Plate Techtonics, to Zoology. EVERY one.
Though as The Bible describes “light” it must admit scientific analysis of it (as E=mc² for example) which gives us much of our modern technology.
Also “six days” from an expansive “creation event” (observationally verifiable) must have been very dense in phases, and time will pass more slowly the greater the mass of a system. For example the Global Positioning System (GPS), possibly even in your car, must continually be resynchronized as the satellites are in orbit (where time passes more quickly) but the command base is on earth (where time passes more slowly).
To me this makes God even greater.
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