Qualla: Nadir Crater https://qualla.com/nadir-crater en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Nadir Crater https://qualla.com/nadir-crater Nadir Crater: Introduction https://qualla.com/nadir-crater/ Nobody went looking for it. A geophysicist named Uisdean Nicholson was scrolling through seismic survey data of the seafloor off West Africa - the kind of routine subsurface imaging that oil and gas companies commission by the thousands - when a shape stopped him cold. Buried under hundreds of meters of ocean-floor sediment, roughly 400 kilometers off the coast of Guinea, sat a near-perfect circle nearly nine kilometers across, complete with a raised rim and a peak rising from its center. There was no land here, no volcano, no obvious explanation. It looked, impossibly, like the fingerprint of something that had fallen from the sky.

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]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/9/e/v/nadir-crater-wp/e9ev-nadir-crater-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Nadir Crater: The Shape That Shouldn't Be There https://qualla.com/nadir-crater/ Craters announce themselves through geometry. The Nadir feature checks every box scientists use to identify an impact: the ratio of its width to its depth, the height of its encircling rim, and a central uplift - a mound of rock that rebounds upward in the instant after a high-en...

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]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/9/e/v/nadir-crater-wp/e9ev-nadir-crater-the-shape-that-shouldnt-be-there.mp3 0:06 2 full Nadir Crater: A Bad Day, 66 Million Years Ago https://qualla.com/nadir-crater/ The asteroid that carved the Nadir Crater was no Chicxulub - the city-sized rock whose impact off Mexico's Yucatan ended the age of dinosaurs. This one was smaller, an estimated 450 to 500 meters wide, comparable to the asteroid Bennu that NASA recently sampled. But size is relat...

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]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/9/e/v/nadir-crater-wp/e9ev-nadir-crater-a-bad-day-66-million-years-ago.mp3 0:06 3 full Nadir Crater: One Rock, or a Swarm? https://qualla.com/nadir-crater/ That coincidence is tantalizing, and scientists are careful with it. The crater's age currently carries an uncertainty of about a million years - a blink in geological time, but wide enough that the Nadir impact could have come just before, during, or just after Chicxulub. If it ...

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]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/9/e/v/nadir-crater-wp/e9ev-nadir-crater-one-rock-or-a-swarm.mp3 0:06 4 full Nadir Crater: The Ocean's Memory https://qualla.com/nadir-crater/ What makes the Nadir Crater remarkable is not just what it is, but that we found it at all. Impact craters on land erode, fill in, and vanish under cities and forests. The ocean hides its own far more thoroughly, draping every scar in sediment. This one survived because it was bu...

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]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/9/e/v/nadir-crater-wp/e9ev-nadir-crater-the-oceans-memory.mp3 0:06 5 full