* Astronomy

Researchers have found evidence from an Ice Core of a Large Impact that occurred circa 1443 S.D.

Dallas Abbott of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and her colleagues analysed melt water from nine samples taken from the West Antarctic Siple Dome ice core that date between 1440 and 1448 A.D. and found high values of potassium and calcium as well as impact glass, microcrystalline magnetite, minerals and five microfossils corresponding to the 1443 A.D. level.
These data appear to correspond with the timing and effects of an impact that produced a 24km crater on the southern New Zealand shelf and that may have resulted in tsunami run-ups of as much as 130m in Jervis Bay Australia.

Mahuika crater is a submarine bolide impact crater, 20±2 kilometres wide and over 153 meters deep, on the New Zealand continental shelf at 48°18′S 166°24′E, named for the Maori god of fire.

Around the year 1500, the natives of New Zealand abandoned their southern coastal settlements. It has been supposed that an earthquake-induced tsunami was the cause. However, such a tsunami would have to have been some five times larger than any other in the area to account for the geological evidence, both in New Zealand and on Australia's east coast. In a presentation at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in November 2003, Abbott suggests that a bolide impact would explain both the geological and anthropological evidence better than an earthquake.