Chicxulub impact unleashed colossal global tsunami.Sixty-six million years ago, the reign of the dinosaurs, a dynasty that had dominated Earth for over 160 million years, came to a cataclysmic end. The culprit? A cosmic bullet, a colossal asteroid roughly the size of a small city, hurtling through space at unimaginable speed. Its target: the shallow seas of what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact was not just a collision; it was a planetary-scale detonation, an event that reshaped the very face of our world and triggered a cascade of devastating consequences, including a tsunami of truly monstrous proportions. While the image of firestorms and a choking, dust-laden atmosphere often dominates our understanding of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event, the sheer power unleashed into the oceans is equally staggering. The impact carved out the Chicxulub crater, a scar over 180 kilometers wide, and in its immediate aftermath, it birthed a wave unlike anything seen before or since – a tsunami estimated to have reached an initial height of a staggering 1.5 kilometers, nearly a mile high. To put that into perspective, the largest recorded tsunami in modern history, triggered by the 1958 Lituya Bay landslide in Alaska, reached a terrifying but comparatively modest 524 meters. The Chicxulub tsunami dwarfed even that colossal wave. The asteroid left a crater over 150 kilometres wide, centred just off the coast of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. Credit: Wikipedia Imagine: a wall of water taller than the world’s tallest skyscrapers, surging outwards from the impact zone with unimaginable force. This wasn’t your typical earthquake-generated tsunami, a series of long-period waves rippling across the ocean. This was a direct, violent displacement of an immense volume of water, a shockwave translated into a liquid behemoth. Interestingly, the initial towering wave was just the beginning of the aquatic chaos. As the colossal column of water crashed back down into the newly formed crater, it didn’t simply settle. Instead, it rebounded, like a giant splash in a cosmic bathtub. This created a series of secondary waves, each still possessing immense energy, radiating outwards across the globe. Computer simulations, have been crucial in helping scientists unravel this complex sequence of events, painting a vivid picture of the watery apocalypse. The scale of this ancient tsunami was so vast that its fingerprints can still be detected today, thousands of kilometers from the impact site. Geologists have unearthed telltale layers of sediment in locations as far afield as Europe and even New Zealand, layers that bear the unmistakable signature of a cataclysmic wave. These sedimentary records often contain shocked quartz, microtektites (small glassy spheres formed from molten rock ejected during the impact), and even traces of iridium, an element rare on Earth but abundant in asteroids – all evidence pointing back to the Chicxulub impact. Consider the speed and power of these waves. Near the epicenter, in the Gulf of Mexico, the initial surges likely traveled at speeds exceeding 100 meters per second (over 220 miles per hour), with wave heights surpassing 100 meters. These weren’t gentle swells; they were monstrous walls of water capable of scouring coastlines, ripping apart landscapes, and carrying massive boulders inland. One fascinating aspect of the research involves analyzing the directionality of these ancient wave deposits. By studying the orientation of the sediments and the size of the transported debris, scientists can reconstruct the path and intensity of the tsunami as it propagated across different ocean basins. This is like forensic science on a planetary scale, piecing together the events of a long-lost day. The global reach of the Chicxulub tsunami underscores the interconnectedness of our planet. An event localized to a relatively small area could unleash forces that reverberated across the entire globe, impacting not only the land and atmosphere but also the deepest parts of the oceans. The Chicxulub impact wasn’t just about a rock falling from the sky; it was a planetary reset button, and the mile-high tsunami was one of its most devastating pushes. The post Mile-High Tsunami Wave Followed Dinosaur Extinction Asteroid appeared first on Anomalien.com.