Evidence of ancient global extinction crater reported

WASHINGTON - Millions of years before the dinosaurs vanished, an even bigger mass extinction wiped out more than 90 percent of the species on Earth. Now scientists think they may have evidence of an impact crater that contributed to the "Great Dying."

The Permian-Triassic Extinction took place some 250-million years ago in a vastly different world from today. Scientists have debated its cause for years.

The end of the dinosaurs 65-million years ago is widely thought to have been caused by a meteor impact off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

A team led by Luann Becker of the University of California at Santa Barbara reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Science that a crater off the northwest coast of Australia shows evidence of a large meteor impact at the time of the early extinction.

They call it Bedout Crater (pronounced Beh-doo).

Vital to their conclusion was the discovery that core samples had been drilled in the region in the search for oil.

She said her team was "flabbergasted" when members looked at the never-before studied cores, which contained meteorite fragments, "shocked" quartz and other impact evidence.

In addition, quartz and other minerals blasted out by the impact have been found in Australia, Antarctica and possibly India, said Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research, a private geological research company in Aquasco, Md.

The impact occurred at the right time, so it is a good candidate for the cause of the extinction, said Robert Poreda of the University of Rochester, N.Y.

The prevailing theory about the cause of this extinction had blamed a series of volcanic eruptions over thousands of years that buried what is now Siberia in molten rock and released tons of toxic gases into the atmosphere, changing the Earth's climate.

The new find provides "suggestive ... but perhaps not yet compelling evidence" that an impact was involved, said Douglas H. Erwin, a senior paleobiologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

This mass extinction was a fundamental transition in the history of life on Earth, Erwin said. He said further study will be done to try to confirm the new theory.

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