Did a meteorite strike near Bombay wipe out the dinosaurs?

More recent evidence showed that a much bigger meteor, 25 miles wide hurtling toward Earth at 36,000 miles per hour, struck the earth 65 million years ago near present-day Bombay, India. This was the same time that the dinosaurs disappeared from the planet, according to says Sankar Chatterjee, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University.

Chatterjee said the Shiva evidence suggests the meteorite struck at the same time as the mass extinction and created enough catastrophic force to destroy 70 percent of Earth’s plant and animal communities on land and in the seas.

The Shiva crater is a massive 300 mile wide "pock mark" in the earth with a 3 mile peak as high as Mount McKinley. Chatterjee conducted a 10-year study using geophysical evidence and core samples collected by oil companies to map out the crater. This was necessary because this crater is covered by by more than 5 miles of sediment.

If Chatterjee's team is right, "the Shiva impact vaporized Earth’s crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India".

The impact is also believed to have been instrumental in the sudden northward acceleration of the Indian plate, then a continent located south of the equator, to collide with Asia and form the Himalayas.

According to Chatterjee, the impact from this meteor would have been more powerful than an explosion generated by the nuclear arsenal of the entire world.

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