What provides evidence of meteorite impact?

Answer 1

A giant hole in the ground. ________________________ That's one good clue, like Arizona's Meteor Crater. But there are others.

At the boundary layer in the Earth between the Cretaceous layer of the dinosaurs and the Tertiary layer that followed, there is a sprinkling of iridium dust. Iridium is rare on Earth, but frequently found in meteorites, suggesting that a meteorite impact may be the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Answer 2

They can be seen in the sky in the form of meteors and lots of fragments of meteorites have been found on the ground. In terms of larger ones causing large scale damage, much as there are craters on the moon, there are many on the Earth. The one in Arizona is the most well known, but there are many others. As things can grow on Earth, many of them get covered over by grasslands and forests and so they are not as notable as they are on the moon, but they are there.

Answer 3

The end of the "Mesozoic Era" coincides with the abupt disappearance of almost all large animal life on the Earth, about 65 million years ago. Luis Alvarez determined that a number of interesting factors including a layer of "shocked quartz" and iridium dust that occurred at about the same time, and this led to his hypothesis that a large object had impacted the Earth causing the extinction.

Answer 4

The physicist Luis Alvarez, working with his son Walter Alvarez, developed the hypothesis that an asteroid impact may have caused the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago. Around the world, geologists and palentologists had discovered a thin layer of clay which sharply marked the division; dinosaurs and older life forms below, not much immediately above the clay layer. The clay contained microscopic diamonds and "shocked quartz" minerals, and an elevated level of the rare element iridium. Scientists found this clay layer all around the world. Alvarez suggested that the iridium could have been carried to Earth on an asteroid, because spectrographic analysis of many asteroids suggest elevated levels of iridium, and the microdiamonds and shocked quartz could have been caused by the incredible heat and pressure of an impact event.

Petroleum geologists working in the Gulf of Mexico discovered a field of shattered rock layers, and scientists gradually concluded that this area was the most likely location of the asteroid impact.

Curiously, there's an area almost directly on the opposite side of the Earth called the "Deccan Traps", which are another layer of shattered rock. Scientists working on the Deccan Traps area had concluded that massive volcanic eruptions were the probable cause of the shattered rock formations, about 66 million years ago.

If you fire a bullet into a thick piece of wood, the bullet will drive itself into the wood - but even if the bullet doesn't penetrate, it will often drive splinters to be ejected from the other side of the wood. Could the Deccan Traps be an area where the asteroid impact's shock wave through the Earth's core had erupted on the far side of the Earth?

Answer 5

For a start, that depends what you mean with "there".