In a North Dakota deposit far from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, remains of the rock from space were preserved within amber, a paleontologist says.
GREENBELT, Md. — Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago.
The object that slammed off the Yucatán Peninsula of what is today Mexico was about six miles wide, scientists estimate, but the identification of the object has remained a subject of debate. Was it an asteroid or a comet? If it was an asteroid, what kind was it — a solid metallic one or a rubble pile of rocks and dust held together by gravity?
A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts.
“If you’re able to actually identify it, and we’re on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, ‘Amazing, we know what it was,’” Robert DePalma, the paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said on Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.
In the latest findings, which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Mr. DePalma and his research colleagues focused on bits of unmelted rock within the glass. “All these little dirty nuggets in there,” said Mr. DePalma, a graduate student at the University of Manchester in England and an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University. “Every single speck that takes away from this beautiful clear glass is a piece of debris.”
Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, “collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now.”
GREENBELT, Md. — Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago.
The object that slammed off the Yucatán Peninsula of what is today Mexico was about six miles wide, scientists estimate, but the identification of the object has remained a subject of debate. Was it an asteroid or a comet? If it was an asteroid, what kind was it — a solid metallic one or a rubble pile of rocks and dust held together by gravity?
A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts.
“If you’re able to actually identify it, and we’re on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, ‘Amazing, we know what it was,’” Robert DePalma, the paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said on Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.
In the latest findings, which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Mr. DePalma and his research colleagues focused on bits of unmelted rock within the glass. “All these little dirty nuggets in there,” said Mr. DePalma, a graduate student at the University of Manchester in England and an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University. “Every single speck that takes away from this beautiful clear glass is a piece of debris.”
Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, “collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now.”
