Under the North Sea, around 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, there’s a massive crater – and for decades, scientists couldn’t agree on what caused it.
What is the Silverpit Crater?
The Silverpit Crater lies 700 metres (2,300 feet) beneath the North Sea floor. It spans around 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) across and is surrounded by a larger ring of circular faults extending approximately 20 kilometres (12 miles). Faults are formed when the Earth’s crust is stressed or displaced and appear as fractures in layers of rock.
Solving Silverpit’s mystery
The crater was first discovered in 2002, and its origins have been the subject of intense debate by geologists ever since. There were several hypotheses for its formation: that it was caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth; it was the result of shifting underground salt deposits; or part of the seabed collapsed due to volcanic processes.
The mystery was finally resolved in 2025, after a group of researchers turned to newly-available seismic data. This allowed them to create detailed pictures of the underground rock layers, using reflected sound waves directed around the crater.
They also examined rock fragments collected from an oil exploration well near the site.
“Samples from an oil well in the area revealed rare ‘shocked’ quartz and feldspar crystals at the same depth as the crater floor,” explained lead researcher Uisdean Nicholson, from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“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.”
The resulting tsunami
The team concluded that the Silverpit Crater was created by an impact asteroid during the middle Eocene Epoch, between 43-46 million years ago. Key mammal groups emerged during this period, including ungulates (such as early deer and cattle) and cetaceans (such as whales and dolphins).
- Are blue whales and mouse-deers related? These ungulates have more in common than you might think
- Whales, dolphins and porpoises of the UK guide
“Our evidence shows that a 160-meter-wide asteroid hit the seabed at a low angle from the west,” said Nicholson.
“Within minutes, it created a 1.5-kilometer-high curtain of rock and water that then collapsed into the sea, creating a tsunami over 100 meters high.”
For context, the resulting wave would have towered over Big Ben (which stands at 96 metres tall).
Silverpit’s asteroid would have been relatively small compared to the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, as its resulting crater (known as the Chicxulub crater, centred on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula) measures 150 kilometres (93 miles) in diameter.
However, the Silverpit asteroid still would’ve created significant damage, with the impact and subsequent tsunami instantly killing nearby animals and churning up huge amounts of sediment – changing the sea floor forever.
