Comment on ‘‘Bedout: A Possible End-Permian Impact Crater Offshore of Northwestern Australia’’

Nearly a decade ago, Gorter (1) suggested that the Bedout basement high, offshore Western Australia, might represent an impact structure, in view of the site_s well-defined circular Bouguer anomaly and seismic reflec-tion data indicating a possible ring syncline. Recently, Becker et al. (2), as part of the search for the cause or causes of the mass extinction that marks the Permian-Triassic (P-T) boundary (3), examined the P-T bound-ary breccia cored at a depth of 3044 m in the Bedout-1 well and with an age (using plagioclase 40Ar/39Ar dating) of 250.7 T 4.3 million years (My)—within experimental error from the age of the P-T extinction even