Even worse, telling the difference between sediments washed up in a tsunami and those left by a strong storm can be incredibly difficult. So far the team has only found impact ejecta in deposits in the Hudson, with some as far as 50 kilometers (31 miles) upriver from the mouth. But they have taken samples of suspicious-looking sediments along the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island as well, and hope to find more of the same strange minerals pointing to an impact origin. "We've had strong storms in New York's history that haven't made deposits anything like this," Cagen said. "We don't know how big it was, but it would have been more than a splash against Manhattan; the city would have been devastated." Cagen is convinced her team's work proves an impact caused the tsunami but admits they'll need to find the smoking gun -- a crater, probably buried in the continental shelf off New Jersey -- to convince skeptics. "We're making the pretty outrageous claim that not only did a tsunami hit the New York metropolitan area 2,300 years ago, but it was caused by an asteroid impact for which we can't find a crater," she said.
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