THE asteroid impact blamed for killing the dinosaurs didn’t just cause underwater havoc in the Atlantic near where it landed, it also shook the Pacific.
The shock of the impact, where Mexico is today, caused earthquakes of magnitude 13 on the Richter scale up to 7000 kilometres away. These triggered massive underwater landslides in the Caribbean and Atlantic. Now Cathy Busby of the University of California at Santa Barbara has found the first evidence of similar events in the Pacific. She reports in Geology (vol 30, p 697) that the quakes opened a 200-metre deep valley, which was 5 kilometres…
