Eltanin
Coordinates: 57 ° 47 ′ 0 ″ S , 90 ° 47 ′ 0 ″ W.
Eltanin was an asteroid and describes the impact structure it left behind on the sea floor of the South Pacific .
The asteroid hit the edge of the Bellingshausen Sea about 2.2 million years ago - in the early Pleistocene - west of the Antarctic Peninsula and southwest of Chile . The region of the impact lies at a depth of around 5000 meters. It has a diameter of several hundred kilometers and is covered by a 20-40 meter thick layer of sediment . The impactor had a diameter of over one kilometer, a speed of about 20 km / s and an impact energy of about 100 gigatons of TNT , which corresponded to that of about five million Hiroshima bombs .
The Eltanin asteroid impact is the only known asteroid impact in a deep ocean basin. It was discovered in 1981 on the basis of an increased iridium concentration and meteoritic splinters in sediment cores that had been extracted in 1965 with the US research vessel Eltanin. In 1995 and 2001 two targeted expeditions were carried out with the German polar research ship Polarstern ; the international research team examined the area using sound waves and other sediment cores. No surviving impact craters could be detected in the relief of the ocean floor .
See also
Web links
- EGU: The late Pliocene impact of the Eltanin asteroid into the Southern Ocean - Documentation and environmental consequences. (PDF, English; 43 kB)
- LPI: New data on the late Pliocene Eltanin impact into the deep southern ocean (PDF, English; 75 kB)
- uni-protocol.de: Meteorite impact
- Zeit Online: Cosmic Bomb