An Asteroid “Double Disaster” Struck Germany in the Miocene
https://eos.org/articles/an-asteroid-double-disaster-struck-germany-in-the-miocene Source: By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A Gothic church rises high above the medieval town of Nördlingen, Germany. But unlike most churches, St. George’s is composed of a very special type of rock: suevite , a coarse-grained breccia that’s formed only in powerful impacts. That discovery and other lines of evidence have helped researchers determine that Nördlingen lies within an impact crater. Now, scientists have unearthed evidence that this crater and another one just 40 kilometers away were formed by a “double disaster” of two independent asteroid impacts. ...Our planet is dotted with nearly 200 confirmed impact structures , and a handful of them appear in close pairs. Some researchers have proposed that these apparent double craters are scars created by binary asteroids slamming into Earth at the same time. ...However, scientists have theoretically determined that the binary asteroi