When the asteroid that contributed mightily to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs crashed into what we now know as the Yucatan Peninsula, it made a big crater, which was found millions of years later by seismology and hydrology (because the cenotes define part of the rim). That means that thousands of tons of Earth material got immediately excavated and thrown skyward.
And, now it turns out, it also made a really, really, really big splash. Which makes sense, but science has to definitively determine that these things happened.
I'm linking below to both a public release article about it and the actual paper.
First global tsunami simulation of the Chicxulub Asteroid Impact 66 million years ago (this is from NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, because one of their scientists was a co-author)
"The study authors calculated that the initial energy in the tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy in the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people and is one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record.
“Our study is the first estimate of the global impact of the tsunami generated by the Chicxulub asteroid,” said Vasily Titov, co-author of the study [the scientist from PMEL]. ”The models estimate that virtually all world coastlines experienced catastrophic flooding from that tsunami.”
The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami (the actual paper)
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