Revision History

Scientists have definitively confirmed that the Silverpit Crater, a mysterious structure buried 700 meters beneath the North Sea floor approximately 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, was created by a 160-meter asteroid impact roughly 43 to 46 million years ago. The impact generated a 1.5-kilometer-high curtain of rock and water that collapsed into a tsunami exceeding 100 meters (330 feet) in height, resolving a two-decade scientific controversy that once saw geologists vote overwhelmingly against an impact origin at a famous 2009 Geological Society of London debate.