Experts Drilled Into The Crater That Killed the Dinosaurs And Made An Incredible Discovery

experts drilled into the crater that killed the dinosaurs and made an incredible discovery scientists know what happened here the Chicxulub crater marks the point of contact for an asteroid so enormous that it wiped out a planet's worth of dinosaurs but as they dig into the massive divot they realize precisely what happened when the space rock struck the earth and their findings paint a terrifying picture to say the least of course much was already known about the Chicxulub crater it stretches 93 miles in diameter and plunges a stunning 12 miles into the ground of all of the known impact points on earth it is the second largest in the world and even though it appeared about 66 million years ago its peak ring remains in one piece this particular detail highlights just how stunning the Chicxulub crater and its long-term preservation has already proven to be it's the only crater on the planet that has its peak rings still intact the next available one for scientists to study sits rather inconveniently on the moon still all this information has to do with the craters dimensions and exterior features now those scientists have gone beyond the topical details of the Chicxulub crater digging into the expanse which sits a kilometre beneath Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula they uncovered the impact that an up to 50 mile wide asteroid had on the planet the Chicxulub crater derives its name from the nearby Mexican town of the same name and experts estimate that an asteroid or comet ranging in size from six point eight to fifty point three miles in diameter smashed into the earth at this very spot it's hard to imagine such a massive piece of space debris hurling in the direction of our planet perhaps even more stunning is the abyss that left behind the Chicxulub crater has an estimated diameter of 93 miles for reference that's just one point six miles shorter than the drive between New York City and Philadelphia experts have been able to calculate the strength which which this space rock smashed into the earth to they estimate it had 21 - nine hundred twenty-one billion times as much energy as the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in World War two even the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba the strongest human-made explosive to ever detonate couldn't compare the asteroid or comet released 100 million times the energy of Tsar Bomba upon impact so with that much power the size of the Chicxulub crater makes sense it's not just its width that's extra large either the crater reaches depths of up to eighteen point six miles into the earth these dimensions make chicks love the second largest impact crater on earth just behind Retta fort in south africa but chicks love as one feature that no other known crater has as we mentioned earlier it's a peak ringed crater this means that the impact site has no single central peak instead the crater as a circle shaped plateau encompassing its center the rim of the crater encircles this ring but it sits at a distance from the center marine geophysicist Sean PS gulick explained to the New York Times in 2016 just how rare the peak ring feature was he said Chicxulub is the only crater on earth with an intact peak ring that we can go sample it's ground zero of the Cretaceous extinction event and yet scientists haven't necessarily rushed to dig into the Chicxulub crater that was partly due to the fact that the massive hole appeared approximately 66 million years ago over time rock and water filled the void and eventually about a kilometer of sedimentary rock covered the crater awesome sign just didn't discover the Chicxulub crater until relatively recently especially considering it's been around for millions of years the first to stumble upon it were geophysicist Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo who found the crater in 1978 and they weren't looking for the asteroid impact site when they discovered it they were searching for petroleum so Penfield and Camargo took to the skies to complete a magnetic survey that mapped any potential drilling locations beneath the Gulf of Mexico he poured over the resulting data though Penfield noticed something particular extraordinary a 40 mile wide underwater arc with impeccable symmetry such a strange discovery inspired Penfield to dig deeper he sought out a gravity map commissioned by his employer oil company petróleos mexicanos in the 1960s on it he noticed another arc but this one curved over the Yucatan Peninsula itself when he put that map and his magnetic survey together he realized that two arcs made a circle Penfield knew he'd found something spectacular the geophysicist hypothesis that he had been pointed a cataclysmic event in the planets geological history petróleos mexicanos allowed him in Camargo to present their findings at the 1981 Society of exploration geophysicist conference unlike the asteroid they presumed to have hit the earth though their presentation made little impact at the time eventually Penfield gave up on his research into the crater much of the evidence he saw it had been destroyed or lost nevertheless he published all the data he had and returned to work meanwhile though other scientists had begun to theorize something similar without having seen Penfield's research specifically a graduate student at the University of Arizona Allen R Hildebrand and his advisor William V Boynton had published their own earth impact theory in 1981 they just needed to find a crater that could corroborate their hypothesis the pair had plenty of geological evidence - and their work got a bit more traction than Penfield's namely a professor in Haiti named Florentine Morris uncovered evidence that an ancient volcano had once stood in his country Hildebrand consequently realized that such a feature could have emerged when a major force of impact crashed nearby and in 1990 he learned the precise spot of such a collision in that year Carlos buyers who reported for the Houston Chronicle queued Hildebrand into Penfield's findings the journalist mentioned that the geophysicist had thought he'd found an impact crater in the vicinity so Hildebrand picked up the phone and the two started analyzing drill samples for the oil company storage unit what Penfield and Hildebrand found amid the drilling debris were shocked metamorphic materials such substances appear after an impact related event causes deformation and heating in normal cases shock metamorphism occurs along with a volcanic eruption but of course Penfield and Hildebrand had uncovered something much bigger than that so then more research into the Chicxulub crater had transpired and more theories about its origins have arisen for instance in September 2007 authors William F Maki David rookie and David Mizrahi offered a theory to nature magazine they said that the rock responsible for creating the crater came from a specific cosmic family called the Baptistina asteroids in spite of the facts that seemed to corroborate their theory new evidence released in 2011 negate their claim researchers had pinpointed the Baptistina asteroids formation to around 80 million years ago this would make it nearly impossible for the space rock to reach the earth when the Chicxulub crater formed 66 million years ago that's because it takes tens of millions of years for asteroids to collide and resonate the discovery of the Chicxulub crater also lent credibility to a theory first formed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez a geologist both men believed that between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods a massive impact on earth had triggered a series of animal and plant extinctions and among them were all the non-avian species of dinosaurs apparently some of the Chicxulub crater statistics do fall in line with the Alvarez theory for one thing initial dating of the crater estimated its formation happening about 66 million years ago this timing would have the asteroid or comet slamming into Earth just between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods just as the father and son duo suspected as such many people believe the Alvarez theory about the Chicxulub crater the impact that caused it also triggered a mass extinction of among other species land and sea dwelling dinosaurs still though so much mystery surrounded the enormous undersea divot so scientists would have to drill into it to learn more it then came time for such an excursion in 2016 marine geophysicist Gulick and geophysicist joanna morgan held a crew of over 30 who represented a dozen different countries the researchers boarded a boat and sailed into the Gulf of Mexico and there they transform their vessel into a drilling station the drilling station stood tall on three legs rising about 40 feet above the Gulf of Mexico's turquoise waters from there the team drilled incredibly far into the earth after the tool delved sixty feet underwater it met the rock below and continued to dig a stunning 2,000 feet into the crust of course over a sixty six million year period the Chicxulub crater had filled with a sizable amount of limestone and sediment but the scientists worked their way past the new collection of rock to find what they were looking for the material that made up the planets only peak ring crater Gulick morgan and their team discovered that a peculiar type of rock made up the peak ring granite normally this variety of rock is found far deeper in the Earth's crust than it appears in the crater this means that the asteroid had such an incredible impact that it pushed sentiment from miles beneath the surface all the way to the top geophysicist Morgan who worked for Imperial College London told the New York Times these rocks behave like a fluid for a short period of time and rocks don't tend to do that it's a very dramatic process when you form a large crater apparently such a chain reaction gave credence to something called the dynamic collapse model theory the dynamic collapse model Theory hypothesizes that asteroids impact push rocks deep into the Earth's crust before pushing them back up out of it then these rocks collapse back down and settled to form the craters Peak rings and the fact that granite forms the craters central plateau goes hand-in-hand with such a theory but drilling into the Chicxulub crater revealed more than one truth about this devastating geological event the rocks also told the story of what happened once the asteroid smashed into the earth which scientists revealed in 2019 and the picture they painted of the world post impact was a terrifying one to say the least Golic said he and the rest of the scientists could be so specific with their findings because they had an unprecedented amount of rock to work with he explained to the New York Times we normally get to read rock records that give us centimeters per thousands of years we have 130 meters for a day The Rock's told a story that went like this first an enormous chunk of cosmic rocks slammed into the ground instantly creating a crater 60 miles wide and 20 miles into the earth the initial impact created waves in the nearby Gulf quite literally a tsunami formed charging in the opposite direction of the new crater the asteroids impact also sent huge pieces of rock hurtling into the air as far as the planets upper atmosphere and likely beyond even that Gulick theorized that almost certainly some of the material would have reached the moon the largest bits meanwhile flew up before crashing back down to the ground still hot from the initial impact some smaller pieces of hot rock took longer to fall and had more time to cool these geological wonders called tektites scattered across the North American continent then water started rushing back into the crater after it waved outward but refilling the geological depression would be tame compared to the next stage when the asteroid collided with the earth it sent a tsunami speeding off in the opposite direction of course water ABB's and flows so soon enough those powerful waves returned back to the crater multiple massive tsunamis with waves towering hundreds of feet in the air then came back over the gaping geological hole the rush of back-and-forth tsunamis quickly filled the peak ring with a 4-inch coating of sand and gravel and as the Gulf raged so too did the land close by furthermore the asteroids impact it also sparked wildfires across the area scientists knew this because they pinpointed pieces of charcoal in the peak ring just above the tsunami sediments these wildfires could have started from the asteroids scorching thermal energy upon impact the affer mentioned shower of molten rock would have had something to do with it either way gulick told the new york times probably not everything burned but certainly there were global wildfires altogether these tsunamis falling rock and fires wiped out a stunning number of cretaceous area species - it's hard to believe that scientists could conjure such haunting images from layers of rock hidden deep beneath the Yucatan Peninsula for planetary geologist Paul Bern the Chicxulub crater x' layers made palpable some long-standing scientific theories he told the newspaper that it was one thing to develop and simulate such hypothesis but it was quite another to see it and considering the size and scope of the crater this could be just the beginning of these startling secrets uncovered there