Shiva crater

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

According to the impact hypothesis, it formed around 65 million years ago, at about the same time as a number of other impact craters and the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (K-T boundary). Although the site has shifted since its formation because of sea floor spreading, it has been suggested that when pieced together the putative crater would have been about 600 km by 400 km across and 12 km deep (and may be just part of a larger crater). It is estimated that a crater of that size would have been made by an asteroid or comet 40 km in diameter.

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, creating a plateau known as the Deccan Traps. The eruptions started a few million years before the K-T extinction and become very abundant at about 65 million years ago. The fact that the supposed Shiva crater lies near the Deccan Traps has been claimed as support for the controversial idea that the eruptions were triggered or accelerated by an impact event. However, it is now thought that impact events ought to cause eruptions on the opposite side of the Earth to where they impacted.

Geology and morphology

Shiva and mass extinction

Main article: Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event

The discovery of Shiva and other craters like those found at Chicxulub and other places has led to the hypothesis that there were in fact multiple impacts which caused the massive extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

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).
• Shiva Structure: A Possible KT Boundary Impact Crater on the Western Shelf of India by Sankar Chatterjee et al., Special Publications Museum of Texas Tech University Number 50 (Oct. 2006).

18°40′N 70°14′E