Overview

• The peer-reviewed study, published September 20 in Nature Communications, concludes the crater formed about 43 million years ago from an asteroid or comet strike.
• Researchers estimate an impactor roughly 160 meters wide hit the shallow sea, generating a tsunami of more than 100 meters in height.
• High-resolution seismic data acquired in 2022, combined with numerical modeling, revealed sharply defined faults, backwash-cut troughs, and probable secondary craters.
• Microscopic analysis of oil-well cuttings identified rare shocked quartz and feldspar at the crater-floor depth, which the authors say is diagnostic of an impact.
• The finding overturns a 2009 Geological Society vote favoring a non-impact origin and establishes Silverpit—80 miles off Yorkshire and buried under ~700 meters of sediment—as a rare, well-preserved marine impact site far smaller than Chicxulub.