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Concept
Chicxulub crater
Summary
The Chicxulub crater (tʃikʃuˈlub) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore near the community of Chicxulub, after which it is named. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when a large asteroid, about in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be in diameter and in 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.
The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater and gave up his search. Later, through contact with Alan R. Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the crater's impact origin includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.
The date of the impact coincides with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the K–Pg or K–T boundary). It is now widely accepted that the resulting devastation and climate disruption was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
In the late 1970s, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Walter Alvarez, put forth their theory that the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was caused by an impact event. The main evidence of such an impact was contained in a thin layer of clay present in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) in Gubbio, Italy. The Alvarezes and colleagues reported that it contained an abnormally high concentration of iridium, a chemical element rare on Earth but common in asteroids. Iridium levels in this layer were as much as 160 times above the background level.
Official source
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