Shiva’s Fury

A meteorite 40 km in diameter that struck off the west coast of India may have doomed the dinosaurs.

A buried crater centred at Bombay High off the west coast of India could well be the result of the biggest meteorite collision the earth has ever seen. The source of much of India’s gas and petroleum reserves in the Arabian Sea today, the crater created by the impact would have signalled the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years earlier.

In a paper to be presented at the forthcoming meet of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and Naresh M Mehrotra of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow, have suggested that, ‘the buried and multi-ringed Shiva crater (500 km diameter) on the western shelf of India is the remnant of a giant meteorite impact’.

Their calculations show the impact would have released the energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs. According to a GSA press release, the geological evidence is dramatic—Shiva’s outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 km in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as Bombay High, which would be 4.8 km tall from the ocean floor. Most of the crater lies submerged on India’s continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs.

In the abstract of their paper, the geologists state, ‘The impact was so powerful that it led to several geodynamic anomalies: it fragmented, sheared, and deformed the lithosphere mantle across the western Indian margin and contributed to major plate reorganisation in the Indian Ocean. It initiated rifting between India and Seychelles in the west and created the Laxmi Ridge; it shattered the Indian plate easterly along the Narmada-Son Rift extending 1,500 km across, dividing the Indian shield into a southern peninsular block and a northern foreland block.’

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Hartosh Singh Bal