The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It was formed when a large asteroid or comet about 11 to 81 kilometers in diameter struck the Earth. The crater is estimated to be 150 kilometers in diameter and 20 kilometers in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 kilometers depth.
About Chicxulub crater in brief
The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It was formed when a large asteroid or comet about 11 to 81 kilometers in diameter struck the Earth. The crater is estimated to be 150 kilometers in diameter and 20 kilometers in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 kilometers depth. It is the second largest confirmed impact structure on Earth, and the only one whose peak ring is intact and directly accessible for scientific research. In 2016, a scientific drilling project drilled deep into the peak ring of the impact crater, hundreds of meters below the current sea floor, to obtain rock core samples from the impact itself. The discoveries were widely seen as confirming current theories related to both the crater impact and its effects. A 2020 study concluded that the ChicxULub crater was formed by an inclined impact from the northeast. In 1981, University of Arizona graduate student Alan R. Hildebrand and faculty adviser William V. Boynton published a draft Earth-impact theory and sought a candidate crater. Their evidence included shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas. In 1980, Nobel Prize-winning geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, put forth their hypothesis that a large extraterrestrial body had struck Earth at the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, slightly more than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the mass extinction event, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
They were unaware of Glen Penfield’s discovery of the crater in 1981, unaware of the existence of shocked quartz and small glass beads that weathered in the region. In the 1980s, Penfield published his findings and returned to his Pemex work. He was told his findings had been published and published his father’s work. In 2012, the U.S. Geological Survey published a report on the crater and its origin. The report attracted scant attention and many experts in impact craters and the K–Pg boundary were attending a separate conference on Earth impacts. In 2013, a new study found that the crater was the likely Cretsaceous-Paleogenian boundary event, and that it was caused by a comet or asteroid that hit the Earth in the early Cretassic period. The study concluded the impactor was a large comet that struck the planet at a time when the Earth was at the beginning of its history as we know it. The impactor is thought to have been about 11-81 kilometers in diameter and caused the extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth. In 1951, one bored into what was described as a thick layer of andesite about 1.3 kilometers down. This layer could have resulted from the intense heat and pressure of an Earth impact, but at theTime of the borings it was dismissed as a lava dome—a feature uncharacteristic of the area’s geology.
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This page is based on the article Chicxulub crater published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
