* Astronomy

"Catastrophic coincidence" seems barely adequate to describe that day 30 million years ago.

While volcanoes were spewing floods of magma over southern Arabia, a meteorite was hurtling through space towards central Europe.
It was only in the last year that researchers have been able to obtain a relatively accurate date of the impact that left a 17km-wide crater in Belarus, then realising that it coincided with the flood volcanism then underway in what is now Yemen.
As the lead researcher, Sarah Sherlock of Britains Open University, explains, the interest in the coincidence comes from it being only the second proven example of a catastrophic coincidence. The other example of this double whammy of meteorite impact and flood volcanism is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
According to research published this month in the Journal of the Geological Society, the meteorite that hit what is now Belarus and the flood volcanism in Yemen are associated with a period of previously unexplained sudden global cooling and sea-level fluctuation.

Read more


Logoisk crater is a meteorite impact crater in Belarus near the city of Lahojsk.
It is 15 km in diameter and the age is estimated to be 42.3 ± 1.1 million years (Eocene). The crater is not exposed at the surface.

Source

Latitude: 54°12'N, Longitude: 27°48'E