Portal:Astronomy/Featured/October 2005



The Silverpit crater is a crater located in the North Sea off the coast of the United Kingdom. It was discovered in 2002 during the analysis of seismic data collected during routine exploration for oil, and was initially reported as the UK's first known impact crater. However, alternative origins have subsequently been proposed.

Its age is thought to be of the order of 65 million years, making its formation roughly coincident with the impact that created the Chicxulub Crater. If Silverpit is indeed an impact crater, this may imply that the Earth was struck at that time by several objects, possibly in a similar event to the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. Several other impact craters around the world are known to date from roughly the same epoch, lending credence to this theory.

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