Zhamanshin crater
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Zhamanshin is a meteorite crater in Kazakhstan. It is 14 kilometres in diameter and the age is estimated to be 900,000 ± 100,000 years. The crater is exposed at the surface.
Impact glass from the Zhamanshin impact site
Pingualuit aerial 2007
Extinction event
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An extinction event is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp fall in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It occurs wh
Zhamanshin crater
…the magnitude that could have produced a disruption comparable to that of a nuclear winter, but it was not sufficiently large enough to have caused a mass extinction. Preliminary papers in the late 1970s suggested either Elgygytgyn, or Zhamanshin, as the source of the Australasian strewnfield…
Trilobites were highly successful marine animals through much of the Paleozoic, only to succumb to extinction at the Permian–Triassic extinction event
Badlands near Drumheller, Alberta, where erosion has exposed the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.
Luis (left) and Walter Alvarez (right) at the K-Pg boundary in Gubbio, Italy in 1981. This team discovered geological evidence for an asteroid impact causing the K-Pg extinction, spurring a wave of public and scientific interest in mass extinctions and their causes
An artist's rendering of an asteroid a few kilometers across colliding with the Earth. Such an impact can release the equivalent energy of several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously.