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Professor Simon Kelley

This event took place on 7th December 2015 at 1:00pm (13:00 GMT)
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

 

Large meteorite impacts – more than just a hole in the ground

Professor Simon Kelley

The Earth has been hit by more large asteroid fragments than the Moon, but it doesn’t have a surface dominated by craters because plate tectonics actively resurfaces (I mean they get covered by mountains and volcanoes), and our thick wet atmosphere tends to cause erosion, removing all the evidence. But the truth is that the Earth’s surface has been potholed by thousands of asteroid impacts and they have devastating effects on the local and sometimes global environment.

Also, unlike the Moon, there is more to meteorite impacts on Earth than just a really big explosion and a hole in the ground. On Earth the holes fill with sediments, sometimes very quickly after the impact, so they record evidence for the post-impact environment and sometimes longer term climate change.

In my talk I’ll illustrate this point using the Boltysh Impact Crater in Ukraine which has an age strikingly similar to the famous Chicxulub crater on the Yukatan peninsula of Mexico, and both are co-incident with the end of the Cretaceous period.

Simon is Professor of Isotopic Geochemistry at the Open University. His research interests cover a wide range of Earth Science including, rates of geological processes and noble gas geochemistry.

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The webcast was open to 500 users



(13 minutes)

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