Sixty -six million years ago, the regime of the dinosaurs, a dynasty that had dominated the earth for more than 160 million years, came to a cataclysmic ending.
The perpetrator? A cosmic bullet, a colossal asteroid roughly the size of a small city, which runs through space with unimaginable speed. The goal: the shallow seas of what is now the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.
The impact was not just a collision; It was a detonation on a planetary scale, an event that reformed the face of our world and caused a cascade of devastating consequences, including a tsunami of real monstrous proportions.
Although the image of fire storms and a stifling atmosphere, often loaded by dust, dominates our understanding of the extinction event of the chalk-paleogenic (K-PG), the pure power that has been released in the oceans is just as amazing.
The impact carve The Chicxulub -Krater, a scar of more than 180 kilometers wide, and in its immediate aftermath it has born a wave in contrast to everything that has been seen before or since then – a tsunami that has reached an initial height of an astonishing 1.5 kilometers, almost a mile high.
To put that in perspective, the largest registered tsunami reached in modern history, caused by the Lituya Bay -1958 in Alaska, a frightening but relatively modest 524 meters. The Chicxulub Tsunami even dwared that colossal wave.
Imagine: a wall of water larger than the world’s highest skyscrapers, rise From the impact zone with unimaginable power. This was not your typical Tsunami generated by the earthquake, a series of waves with long periods babbing over the ocean. This was a direct, violent relocation of an immense amount of water, a shock wave translated into a liquid colossus.
Interesting is that the first towering wave was only the start of the aquatic chaos. While the colossal column of water crashed back into the newly formed crater, it did not hit alone. Instead, it returned, like a gigantic splash in a cosmic bathtub.
This created A series of secondary waves, each still possessing immense energy and shine out all over the world. Computers simulations have been crucial to help scientists unravel this complex order of events, to paint a lively image of the watery Apocalypse.
The scale of this old tsunami was so huge that his fingerprints can still be detected today, thousands of kilometers from the impact location. Geologists have dug up demanding layers of sediment in locations in locations throughout Europe and even new Zeeland, lay the unmistakable signature of a catacly -micical wave.
These sedimentary records often contain shocked quartz, microTtites (small glassy bulbs formed from melted rocks that were cast out during the impact), and even traces of iridium, an element rare on earth but abundantly in asteroids – all evidence that point to the chicxulub im -imp.
Consider the speed and power of these waves. Near the epicenter, in the Gulf of Mexico, the first peaks probably traveled at speeds of more than 100 meters per second (more than 220 miles per hour), with wave heights that surpass 100 meters.
A fascinating aspect of the research includes the analysis of the directionality of these old golf deposits.
By studying the orientation of the sediments and the size of the transported debris, scientists can reconstruct the path and intensity of the tsunami while spreading over different ocean basins. This is as a forensic science on a planetary scale and the merging of the events of a long -lost day.
The global reach of the Chicxulub Tsunami underlines the mutual connection of our planet. An event that is located in a relatively small area can unleash the armed forces that echoed all over the world, who not only influence the country and the atmosphere, but also the deepest parts of the oceans.
The impact of Chicxulub was not only about a rock that fell out of the sky; It was a planetary reset button and the mile-high tsunami was one of the most devastating pushs.
