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The Chicxulub crater (Spanish pronunciation: [t͡ʃikʃuˈlub] ⓘ cheek-shoo-LOOB) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo (not the larger coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto ). [ 3 ]
"So the one that killed the dinosaurs is really special in two ways — by what it did, and also by where it originated." This apocalyptic object is what created the Chicxulub crater on Mexico’s ...
“Modeling studies of the larger Chicxulub impact, which killed off the dinosaurs, also suggest a shift in climate on a much smaller time scale of less than 25 years,” Wade said.
The asteroid that killed most dinosaurs 66 million years ago left behind traces of its own origin. Researchers think they know where the Chicxulub impactor came from based on levels of ruthenium.
Luis Walter Alvarez, left, and his son Walter, right, at the K–T Boundary in Gubbio, Italy, 1981. The Alvarez hypothesis posits that the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other living things during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was caused by the impact of a large asteroid on the Earth.
Further research identified the giant Chicxulub crater, buried under Chicxulub on the coast of Yucatán, as the source of the K–Pg boundary clay. Identified in 1990 [14] based on work by geophysicist Glen Penfield in 1978, the crater is oval, with an average diameter of roughly 180 km (110 mi), about the size calculated by the Alvarez team.
However, in 1991, scientists found that the Chicxulub crater was the right age to have been formed by a massive asteroid strike coinciding with the demise of the dinosaurs.
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid larger than Mt. Everest ripped through the atmosphere of Earth, striking our planet at the Yucatán Peninsula, on the southeastern coast of Mexico.