Although Tanis and Chicxulub were closely related by the remaining Interior Seaway , the massive water waves from the impact area were probably '' not '' responsible for the deposits at Tanis . Any water-borne waves would have arrived between later , long after the microtektites had already fallen fell back to earth , and far too late to leave the geological record found at the site . It is not even clear whether the waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Waterway at that time without being greatly reduced in size . Instead the initial papers on Tanis conclude that much faster earthquake waves , travelling through the earth itself at about for the fast primary waves , probably reached the Hell Creek region within 6 minutes , quickly caused massive surging water movements known as seiches in the shallow waters close to Tanis . Seiche waves often occur a short time after many significant earthquakes , even thousands of miles away , and can be sudden and violent . Some recent examples include the 1964 Alaskan earthquake ( seiches in Puerto Rico ) , the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake ( India/China ) ( seiches in England and Norway ) , the 2010 Chile earthquake ( seiches in Louisiana ) . Notably , after one of the most powerful earthquakes in the last 100 years and at the fourth most powerful in recorded human history struck Japan in 2011 , slower secondary seismic waves traveled over in less than 30 minutes causing seiche waves around high in Norway . The Chicxulub impact is believed to have triggered earthquakes estimated at magnitude , up to 4000 times as powerful in terms of energy release as the Japan quake . Co-author Mark Richards , a professor of earth sciences focusing on dynamic earth crust processes had the insights that these seiche waves would have been around high in the Western Interior Seaway near Tanis and could credibly have created the high water movements evidenced inland at the site , and that the time taken by the seismic waves to reach the region earthquakes almost exactly matched the flight time of the microtektites found at the site . This would resolve conflicting evidence that huge water movements had occurred in the Hell Creek region near Tanis much less than an hour after impact , although the first megatsunamis from the impact zone could not have arrived at the site for almost a full day.EXACT HEIGHTS NEEDED Robert DePalma is a lifelong paleontologist with an M.A. in geology , the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History , and a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Kansas . He has published several discoveries , including a 2010 paper presenting the first known amber-trapped insect fossils from Hell Creek , and a 2013 paper presenting a tyrannosaur tooth embedded in a hadrosaur tail , showing that tyrannosaurs were indeed hunters rather than pure scavengers – a controversy at the time . On the other hand , a published paper was criticized in 2015 and corrected in 2016 , after other scientists noticed that in his reconstruction of a new species he called '' Dakotaraptor '' , he had accidentally included turtle entoplastron ( armour ) fragments in error , taking them to be part of the fossilized furculum . As a result , some paleontologists felt that he might be prone to " over-interpret "
2010 Chile earthquake
2010 Chile earthquake
Tanis (fossil site)