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The Chicxulub crater (Spanish: [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 ]
Chicxulub Pueblo (Mayan pronunciation: [tʃʼikʃuluɓ] Ch’ik Xulub) is a town, and surrounding municipality of the same name, in the Mexican state of Yucatán. At the census of 2010, the town had a population of 4,080 people. The center of the Chicxulub Impact Crater (approx 21°20'N 89°30'W) is off the Yucatan coast, near Chicxulub Puerto
Blum and others compared the isotope ratios of neodymium, oxygen, and strontium found in the Haitian tektites with the igneous rock from the Chicxulub crater. Their results indicated that the crater and the tektites had identical isotope ratios and they concluded that the tektites and the rock "come from the same source". [108]
Uniquely, Tanis appears to record in detail, extensive evidence of the direct effects of the giant Chicxulub asteroid impact which struck the Gulf of Mexico 66.043 million years ago, and wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species (the so-called "K–Pg" or "K–T" extinction).
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.
In 2016, a scientific drilling project drilled deep into the peak ring of the Chicxulub impact crater to obtain rock core samples from the impact itself. This crater is one of the best known impact craters and was the impact responsible for the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
Chicxulub Pueblo Municipality is a municipality in the Mexican state of Yucatán containing (196.72 km 2) of land and located roughly 25 km north of the city of Mérida. [2] The area is directly onshore of the epicenter of the Chicxulub crater .
Numerous theories have been proposed as to why this extinction event happened including an asteroid known as the Chicxulub asteroid, volcanism, or sea level changes. While the mass extinction is well documented, there is much debate about the immediate and long-term climatic and environmental changes caused by the event. [ 1 ]