Britain's secret rocky past: 43-million-year-old asteroid impact confirmed off Yorkshire coast

Scientists have confirmed that the Silverpit Crater, located about 80 miles off the Yorkshire coast, was formed when a 160-meter asteroid struck the seabed roughly 43 million years ago. The impact would have lofted a curtain of rock and water thousands of meters high and triggered a tsunami more than 100 meters tall, according to researchers moderating the study.

The Silverpit Crater was first discovered in 2002, but its origin sparked a long-running debate among geologists. Initial assessments suggested an asteroid or comet impact, while others proposed alternative explanations such as deep-sea salt movement or volcanic activity. In the latest work, scientists from Heriot-Watt University integrated seismic imaging data with evidence from beneath the seabed to settle the question once and for all.

New seismic imaging has given us an unprecedented look at the crater, and samples from an oil well in the area revealed rare "shocked" quartz and feldspar crystals at the same depth as the crater floor. These minerals exhibit a fabric that can only be produced by extreme shock pressures, providing crucial physical evidence that the site is an impact crater. Dr. Uisedan Nicholson, the study’s lead author, said the findings confirm the impact-hypothesis beyond doubt and highlighted the rarity of such preserved structures on Earth.

"Our evidence shows that a 160–metre–wide asteroid hit the seabed at a low angle from the west," Nicholson explained. "Within minutes, it created a 1.5–kilometre high curtain of rock and water that then collapsed into the sea, creating a tsunami over 100 metres high." These observations place Silverpit among a small cadre of well-preserved hypervelocity impact features, a category that is used to understand how such events shape planetary history.

Researchers note that Earth hosts about 200 confirmed impact craters on land, with roughly 33 identified beneath the ocean. The confirmation of Silverpit’s status aligns it with other major craters in the planetary record, including the Chicxulub Crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which is widely linked to the mass extinction event that occurred about 66 million years ago. While the two events are separated by tens of millions of years and different contexts, both illustrate how asteroid impacts can produce rapid, monumental geological and environmental effects.

Dr. Nicholson emphasized that hypervelocity craters are unusually well-preserved on Earth because many are erased by tectonics and erosion. The Silverpit discovery thus adds a valuable data point for scientists studying the history of asteroid impacts, the frequency of such events, and how they may inform assessments of potential future hazards. The findings also support broader efforts to map underwater impact structures, which remain less well understood than their terrestrial counterparts.

The new results not only refine the timeline of events in the North Atlantic region but also offer a clearer view of how a single asteroid strike can generate cascading processes—shock, deformation of rocks, collapse into a tsunami, and long-term sediment and fracture patterns—that leave durable records accessible to deep-sea and subsurface investigations. As researchers continue to study Silverpit, they hope to apply similar approaches to other enigmatic submarine features to build a more complete picture of Earth’s impact history.

In summary, the confirmation of the Silverpit Crater as a hypervelocity impact site off Yorkshire marks a milestone in UK geoscience, adding to the global archive of impact craters and underscoring the dynamic and sometimes violent history of Earth’s encounters with space debris.