Chicxulub impact tsunami megaripples in the subsurface of Louisiana: Imaged in petroleum industry seismic data
Introduction
Sixty-six million years ago (Ma) (Gradstein et al., 2012; Renne et al., 2013) a bolide impacted near what is now the village of Chicxulub on the northwestern corner of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The impact resulted in a crater with a post-collapse rim-to-rim diameter ranging from ∼180-200 km depending on the data utilized, e.g., gravity data, seismic data or topography data (Alvarez et al., 1980; Gulick et al., 2008; Hildebrand et al., 1991; Pope et al., 1991; review by Schulte et al., 2010). The Chicxulub impact resulted in ejected debris, some of which settled from a dust cloud that reached around the world (e.g., as recently modeled by Artemieva and Morgan, 2020) and formed part of the K-Pg boundary deposit. Wildfires were created by direct thermal effects of the impact plume at distances up to 1000-1500 km from the impact (e.g., Shuvalov and Artemieva, 2002) and by thermal radiation from high-speed atmospheric reentry of ejecta at greater distances (e.g., Belcher et al., 2015). As a result, fine dust, ash and aerosols remained in the atmosphere for over a decade blocking much of the sunlight normally reaching the Earth and leading to a drastic temperature drop and diminution of photosynthesis (Gulick et al., 2019 and references therein). The chemistry of the atmosphere was also changed by the insertion of sulphates and carbon dioxide from the impact's vaporization of the shallow carbonate platform target rocks resulting in other devastating short- and long-term climate effects (most recently reconsidered by Artemieva et al., 2017; Gulick et al., 2019 and references therein; Chiarenza et al., 2020). Global effects of the Chicxulub impact are now largely accepted as the causes of the mass extinction marking the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary—in particular, the demise of the dinosaurs (Chiarenza et al., 2020).
In addition to these catastrophic global effects there were other effects which, while having influences over a broad area (DePalma et al., 2019), if not worldwide, were particularly devastating to the region surrounding the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) into which the bolide impacted. The first of these effects to reach sites around the rim of the GoM was a megaearthquake, estimated Richter magnitude, >11 for an impact the size of Chicxulub (Ivanov, 2005), with ground motions, Rayleigh waves, on the order of one hundred times those of any recorded earthquake (Schultz and Gault, 1975). The destabilizing effect of this earthquake resulted in collapse of escarpments of lithified carbonates and in the failure of poorly consolidated clastic/carbonate shelf and slope materials essentially everywhere around the GoM leading to the most voluminous mass transport/turbidite deposits documented on the Earth, the “boundary cocktail” (Bralower et al., 1998; Denne et al., 2013; Sanford et al., 2016). Around the northern arc of the GoM these sediments constitute the lower and largest portion of the Cretaceous/Paleogene Boundary Deposit (KPBD) (Sanford et al., 2016).
These transported, water-rich deposits did not have time to completely settle, let alone become competent, before tsunami, resulting from the direct impact into the shallow waters of the Yucatan shelf (Crawford and Mader, 1998; Ward and Asphaug, 2000) and from collapses of underwater escarpments around the GoM, (Sanford et al., 2016; review by Schulte et al., 2010) swept over the shallow waters and land areas surrounding the deeper GoM, across which the tsunami raced, following the earthquake's Raleigh waves by little more than an hour (Sanford et al., 2016). Tsunami continued for hours to days as they reflected multiple times within the GoM while diminishing in amplitude (Bourgeois et al., 1988; Smit et al., 1996).
Section snippets
Location and setting
Fig. 1 illustrates the location of the Chicxulub crater on the northwestern corner of the Yucatan block south of the GoM. The bathymetry of the GoM is also shown with the deep GoM basin and to the north, a broad shallow shelf extending from northeastern Texas, across northern Louisiana, across Mississippi, and over southern Alabama. The depth depicted by the transition from the blues of the deep GoM to the light grey-blue of the shallow shelf is approximately the depth of storm wave base (R.W.
Data and procedure
Our data consist of the upper two seconds of two-way travel time (TWTT) of the Iatt Lake 3D seismic survey (Fig. 1) acquired by Devon Energy. These data were made available to our research group for studies of the stratigraphy of the Wilcox Gp.
Fig. 2A is a stratal slice discovered within these two seconds of seismic data when the data volume was proportionately flattened to allow studies of seismic geomorphology (Posamentier et al., 2007) within the Wilcox Gp. (Egedahl, 2012; Egedahl et al.,
Interpretations
We interpret the ripples of the seismic images of Fig. 2, Fig. 4, Fig. 5, Fig. 6 and the variable thickness of the upper well-log facies of Fig. 5 to be evidence of megaripples created by the tsunami from the Chicxulub impact. We hypothesize that the tsunami traveled over the GoM as open ocean waves; shoaling and breaking offshore, the “Van Dorn effect” (Korycansky and Lynett, 2005; Van Dorn et al., 1968), as they reached the abrupt shallowing of the GoM within what is now central Louisiana (
Discussion
Tsunami deposits near the K-Pg boundary and of an intensity consistent with the impact of a large bolide at Chicxulub have been recognized/interpreted at more than ten localities around the northern arc of the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) (Bourgeois et al., 1988; Smit et al., 1996; Poag, 2017). Some of these locations are plotted in Fig. 1 to emphasize that tsunami appear to have influenced sedimentation around the northern rim of the GoM from Mexico to Florida. The distinctive stratigraphies at these
Conclusions
We present evidence, images from petroleum industry 3D seismic data, that megaripple depositional features exist buried about 1500 m in northern central Louisiana. These megaripple features have average wavelengths of 600 m and average wave heights of 16 m making them the largest ripples documented on Earth.
As these megaripples are at the top of the KPBD deposit, lying below a thin layer of the fine air fall debris which contains the elemental signature of the Chicxulub impact (Smit et al., 1996
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Gary L. Kinsland: Conceptualization, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft. Kaare Egedahl: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Martell Albert Strong: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Robert Ivy: Conceptualization, Investigation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Devon Energy for the donation of the digital seismic data to our research. The seismic data are presently owned or controlled by Seismic Exchange Inc. (SEI). Access to the raw data by an entity other than the University of Louisiana at Lafayette would require approval by SEI.
To facilitate analysis by the reader of the data displayed, figures which utilized the seismic data are presented in the Supplementary Data as a PowerPoint file which allows the figures to be expanded and
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