An Asteroid “Double Disaster” Struck Germany in the Miocene

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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 asteroid scenario is unlikely. That’s because most binary asteroids are orbiting one another too closely to produce two distinct craters.... ...Now, Elmar Buchner, a geologist at the Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences in Nue-Ulm, Germany, and his colleagues have investigated the provenance of two impact craters near Stuttgart using observational data. They focused on the 24-kilometer-diameter Ries crater—which encompasses the town of Nördlingen—and the 4-kilometer-diameter Steinheim Basin, which are located roughly 40 kilometers from one another. ...The impact that created the Ries crater must have formed first, the scientists surmised, because blocks of limestone—ejecta from the Ries impact—cap the lower seismite horizon. That’s consistent with previous research suggesting that fossils within the Ries crater are a few hundred thousand years older than fossils found within the Steinheim Basin. This region “witnessed a double disaster in the Middle Miocene,” the team concluded in their paper, which was published last month in Scientific Reports.... 

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