Dr Uisdean Nicholson, associate professor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, said new technology had helped to solve the mystery of the crater’s origins.<\/p>\n
He said the research team, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, had recovered rare “shocked” quartz samples which settled the argument.<\/p>\n
“We were exceptionally lucky to find these, a real needle-in-a-haystack effort,” he said.<\/p>\n
“These prove the impact crater hypothesis beyond doubt, because they have a fabric that can only be created by extreme shock pressures.”<\/p>\n
Dr Nicholson said the impact would have caused a 328ft (100m) high tsunami of water. <\/p>\n
The crater lies under the current seabed and is not visible, so scanning equipment, which Dr Nicholson described as “like ultrasound for the earth”, was used to map it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Uisdean Nicholson, associate professor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, said new technology had helped to solve the mystery…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-149031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}