The Silverpit Crater was confirmed as an asteroid impact site. Shocked crystals and seismic data prove the event created a huge tsunami.
For decades, scientists have debated the origin of the Silverpit Crater in the southern North Sea.
New evidence now shows that the structure was created by the impact of an asteroid or comet roughly 43 to 46 million years ago.
The research team, led by Dr. Uisdean Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), combined seismic imaging, microscopic study of rock cuttings, and numerical modeling to produce the most compelling case yet that Silverpit is a genuine impact crater.
Their results were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.
New data ends longstanding controversy
The Silverpit Crater lies 700 meters (2300 feet) beneath the seabed of the North Sea, about 80 miles from the Yorkshire coast.
Since its discovery in 2002, the three-kilometer-wide (1.8 miles) feature—encircled by a 20-kilometer-wide (12.5 miles) ring of circular faults—has been the focus of intense geological debate.
Early studies favored the idea that it was formed by an impact, pointing to its central peak, circular outline, and concentric faults, all traits typical of high-velocity collisions.
Other researchers, however, proposed alternative explanations, suggesting the crater’s shape could have resulted from salt movement deep below the surface or from seabed collapse caused by volcanic processes.
By 2009, the discussion had become so contentious that geologists informally voted on the issue, as reported in the December issue of Geoscientist magazine. The majority at the time rejected the impact hypothesis.
New evidence has proved them wrong.
A 160-m wide asteroid hit the North Sea
The Heriot-Watt-led team used newly available seismic imaging data and evidence from below the seabed to prove the impact theory.
Dr. Uisdean Nicholson, a sedimentologist in Heriot-Watt University’s School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society, said: “New seismic imaging has given us an unprecedented look at the crater.
“Samples from an oil well in the area also revealed rare ‘shocked’ quartz and feldspar crystals at the same depth as the crater floor.
“We were exceptionally lucky to find these – a real ‘needle-in-a-haystack’ effort. These prove the impact crater hypothesis beyond doubt, because they have a fabric that can only be created by extreme shock pressures.”
100-meter-high tsunami
Dr. Nicholson said: “Our evidence shows that a 160-meter-wide (530 feet) asteroid hit the seabed at a low angle from the west.
“Within minutes, it created a 1.5-kilometer (0.9 miles) high curtain of rock and water that then collapsed into the sea, creating a tsunami over 100 meters (330 feet) high.”
Finding ‘the silver bullet’
Professor Gareth Collins from Imperial College London was at the Silverpit Crater debate in 2009 and also provided the numerical models for the new study.
Professor Collins said: “I always thought that the impact hypothesis was the simplest explanation and most consistent with the observations.
“It is very rewarding to have finally found the silver bullet. We can now get on with the exciting job of using the amazing new data to learn more about how impacts shape planets below the surface, which is really hard to do on other planets. ”
Rare and exceptionally-preserved
Dr. Nicholson said, “Silverpit is a rare and exceptionally preserved hypervelocity impact crater.
“These are rare because the Earth is such a dynamic planet – plate tectonics and erosion destroy almost all traces of most of these events.
“Around 200 confirmed impact craters exist on land, and only about 33 have been identified beneath the ocean.
“We can use these findings to understand how asteroid impacts shaped our planet throughout history, as well as predict what could happen should we have an asteroid collision in future.”
The confirmation of Silverpit as an impact crater places it alongside structures such as the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico – linked to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs – and the Nadir Crater off West Africa, which was recently confirmed as an impact site.
Reference: “Multiple lines of evidence for a hypervelocity impact origin for the Silverpit Crater” by Uisdean Nicholson, Iain de Jonge-Anderson, Alex Gillespie, Thomas Kenkmann, Tom Dunkley Jones, Gareth S. Collins, James Frankel, Veronica Bray, Sean P. S. Gulick and Ronnie Parr, 20 September 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63985-z
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), full project details are available online.
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