But of course the continents are not in the same places now that they were then. 66 million years ago, India was farther south and North America farther east. Has anyone figured out exactly how close the Deccan Traps were to the antipodes of Chicxulub at the time of the impact?
You can play with this rotateable globe that you can set for different geological periods.
Annoyingly it doesn’t offer lat-long overlay, but if you put Chixculub at the north pole rotational point, then the south pole is somewhere in presumed ocean between the south-western tip of Australia and the not-too-distant Antarctic plate.
I had a letter published in New Scientist a few years ago on exactly this. I noted the Traps are about 180 degree longitude from the Chixulub crater; perhaps the seismic waves from it were focused in India by going around all sides of the earth’s core, in the same manner that gravitational lensing lets us see galaxies and other structures that are otherwise too far away.
Caloris impact basin and antipode terrain:
So…this is not an Earth-only thing.
But don’t the Deccan traps predate the impact by quite a bit of time?
They do, but apparently they became more active about the time of Chicxulub. So the idea is that the impact opened more fissures or widened the ones already open.
Yes. It looks to me like the antipodes of Chixculub is not close to the Deccan traps at all.
Not the antipodes, no, but 180 degrees on the same latitude is pretty close.
…Not really? There’s nothing special about being on the same latitude, for these purposes.
The Nicaraguan asteroid/comet impact 65 million years ago wiped out all the dinosaurs…
Sorry.
That was my fault.
I got behind in my paperwork.