Off the coast of Great Britain is something of a deep-sea mystery. Seismic data gathered here during gas exploration revealed a feature on the seabed about 130 kilometers (80.7 miles) off England’s Humber Estuary. Known as the Silverpit Crater, it’s a huge dip that's about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) wide and characterized by striking concentric rings. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.
It's a puzzling crater, one that looks more like the sort of thing we see on icy moons like Jupiter’s Callisto . Turns out, that might not be the only out-of-this-world detail about this huge hole in the ground.
The meteor impact hypothesis
The Silverpit Crater was first described in 2002 by geophysicists Simon Stewart and Phil Allen. Th