Silverpit crater the Chicxulub impact near the northwest corner of the Yucatan Peninsula, which occurred 66 million years ago and probably played a major role in the extinction of the dinosaurs. Several other large impact craters of around the same age have been discovered, all between latitudes 20°N and 70°N, leading to the speculative hypothesis that the Chicxulub impact may have been only one of several impacts that happened all at the same time. The collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 proved that gravitational interactions can fragment a comet, giving rise to many impacts over a period of a
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 carbon disulfide persisted in the atmosphere for at least fourteen months after the collisions, with a considerable amount of ammonia being present in the stratosphere as opposed to its normal location in the troposphere. Counterintuitively, the atmospheric temperature dropped to normal levels much more quickly at the larger impact sites than at the smaller sites: at the larger impact sites, temperatures were elevated over a region wide, but dropped back to normal levels within a week of the impact. At smaller sites, temperatures higher than the surroundings persisted for almost two weeks. Global stratospheric temperatures rose immediately after the impacts,