... before suffering various horrible things like being melted, seared, sandblasted and pulped. Quite a show indeed...

flame because it looks vaguely like the moment of impact

Mass destruction can only have improved the look of the village.

Coat already on...

Are you sure anyone would really notice their?

"I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"

"threw material over an area 50km across" - That wouldn't even reach Inverness so there's absolutely no possibility of any harm being done then, or even today - except possibly to a couple of fish farms who, lets face it, could probably do with the insurance money about now.

Apologies to anyone living North or West of Inverness - life is hard enough without escapees like me pretending that there's no electricity north of Edinburgh.

Mine's the one with a predatory micro-organism living in it.

At that date, Scotland was near the Antarctic, in the barren heart of a vast supercontinent where the technologically-advanced giant clams were just on the point of wiping each other out in a war to end wars.

Until now the Government has covered this up because the clams

++ NO SIGNAL ++

Now we know where the Scots came from.

have evolved their targeting since then. OK boys, down a bit, a bit more, now go right. Fire when you're ready. That will be the Lothian Question settled then.

Mass destruction can only have improved the look of the village.

Well perhaps. There are still some nice places which have not been touristed into oblivion... Serves as a great base though...

Im off to Submarine watch now...

"Now we know where the Scots came from."

So superior beings did come from outer space...

Resulting in it being in the news for the first time since Braveheart was released :)

Paris--because she could teach the Scots a thing or two about how to get publicity :)

"threw material over an area 50km across"

Does this mean that the ejecta reached 25 km away from the impact?

What about the Silverpit crater? Or has this been discredited as an impact crater? That crater alone is 3 km wide, with rings extending out to 10 km. Usually ejecta from an impact crater reaches distances hundreds of times the crater diameter.

Maybe I've misunderstood something...

PH, as she knows how to make an impact.

I bet even that didn't stop the miserable Scots whining about how much they hate the English, and how anything south of Hadrian's wall, especially London, sucks.

My coat, because it's grim up North.

I am hereby formally requesting a Groundskeeper Willy icon to be added to the bunch

...just the side effect of an extreme event in the Highland games.

That's me by the way.

ck: "I bet even that didn't stop the miserable Scots whining about how much they hate the English, and how anything south of Hadrian's wall, especially London, sucks."

So, are you saying that London ISN'T an overcrowded, overpriced, and overrated shit-hole, that is primarily populated by 'foreigners' (Scots included)?

The sound of all their voices echoed down through eternity; Serves those dumb squatters right! This is just the beginning of the end hhrrmmpphhh! who did those bacteria think they were anyway! an amoeba or something!?!

PH because who else?

Silverpit is still not confirmed as an impact crater (and probably won't be unless someone stumps up the readies to drill it). There are problems with it being an impact structure because it doesn't resemble anything else on Earth - multiring craters such as those seen on the Moon and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are usually orders of magnitude larger than Silverpit.

There is a plausible alternative hypothesis that it is nothing more than a collapse caused by the withdrawal of the underlying Zechstein salt deposits.

@Slaine

Some of the reports are putting this as a 145 gigatonne explosion, it would have thrown enough crap into the air to darken the skies across the entire Northern Hemisphere, so yes, the good burghers of Inverness would have had plenty to worry about.