Ancient Impact Left Chain of Craters
(From the May/June 1998 issue of StarDate magazine)
Five craters on two continents were caused by the same impact and may have led to a mass extinction similar to the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, says a team of geologists who studied the previously known impact sites. The crater chain, which stretches from Canada through France to the Ukraine, also could refute the long-held belief that Earth's gravity is too weak to break up an incoming object the way Jupiter broke Comet Shoemaker-Levy into pieces before it hit the planet in 1994. Because Earth's plates have shifted since the impact, the scientists used a paleogeographic atlas to show that the craters lay on the same latitude 214 million years ago.
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