Shiva crater

The Shiva crater is a structure, thought by some to be an impact crater (astrobleme), located in the Indian Ocean west of India, near Mumbai. It was named by the paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee for Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and renewal.

It has been suggested that it formed around 65 million years ago, the same time as a number of other impacts that are recorded in the K-T boundary. Although it has shifted since its formation because of sea floor spreading, when pieced together it would be about 600 km by 450 km across and 12 km deep (and may be just part of a larger crater). It is estimated to have been made by a bolide (an asteroid or meteoroid) 40 km in diameter.

The Deccan Traps are closely associated with the crater, lending support to the idea that the traps were created by an impact event. At the time of the K-T extinction, India was located over the Réunion hotspot of the Indian ocean. Hot material rising from the mantle flooded portions of India with a vast amount of lava, the Deccan Traps, beginning a few million years before the K-T extinction and becoming very abundant about 65 million years ago. The vast magma plume finally breaking out at the surface could have been accelerated by an impact event —but could have occurred regardless of such an event.

External links

• The Shiva Crater: Implications for Deccan Volcanism, India-seychelles Rifting, Dinosaur Extinction, and Petroleum Entrapment at the Kt Boundary by Chatterjee, Sankar; Guven, Necip; Yoshinobu, Aaaron; and Donofrio, Richard; Paper No. 60-8, 2003 Seattle Annual Meeting of Geological Society of America (November 2–5, 2003).
• Deep Impact - Shiva: Another K-T Impact? by Leslie Mullen for Astrobiology Magazine (Nov. 2004).

18°40′N 70°14′E