Wilkes Land crater

The meteorite Wilke country is a hypothetical meteorite, make the scientists as the cause of an enormous impact crater under the Antarctic ice responsible. Also the mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary is increasingly the consequences of his felling attributed. The scientific debate is running (see also: Bedout structure and Siberian Trapp ).

Discovery of the impact crater

In May / June 2006, Mascon ( gravity anomaly ) was in evaluations of the GRACE satellite data under the ice of Antarctica in Wilke discovered country, as they are known on the moon in a similar way. Airborne radar images showed a crater nearly 500 km in diameter at the site. The crater probably formed about 250 million years ago by the impact of a large meteorite. The meteorite could have had a diameter of up to 50 km and was thus possibly nearly five times as large as the Chicxulub meteorite, who is blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The force of the impact in Wilke country was disastrous in the opinion of the scientists for the former earth and its inhabitants. In addition to the largest mass extinction of Earth's history at the end of the Permian, in which more than eighty percent of all species have become extinct, the impact has probably contributed to the formation of a trench in the eastern Indian Ocean and ultimately led to the secession of Australia from Gondwana supercontinent. From the upheavals the surviving species, the dinosaurs for the next three geological eras Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous to the dominant fauna living things developed.