Overview

• Heriot‑Watt University researchers report in Nature Communications that Silverpit formed about 43 million years ago.
• Integrated seismic imaging, oil‑well cuttings with shocked quartz and feldspar, and numerical modelling underpin the diagnosis of a hypervelocity strike.
• The team estimates an impactor about 160 metres across that hit at a low angle from the west, lofting a 1.5‑kilometre plume and driving a tsunami over 100 metres high.
• Petroleum geoscientists first mapped the two‑mile‑wide crater in 2002, but a 2009 Geological Society vote favored a non‑impact, salt‑tectonics origin.
• Researchers call Silverpit an exceptionally preserved marine crater about 700 metres beneath the seabed, 80 miles off Yorkshire, far smaller than Chicxulub and not linked to mass extinction.