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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 ]
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.
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.
Evidence at the Chicxulub crater supports the notion that the crash would have been devastating enough to send deadly vaporized rock and gas into the atmosphere, filling the Earth with dust ...
The trajectory of the Chicxulub asteroid led to the most efficient release of gas and projectile rocks – which was disastrous for life on Earth. Dinosaur-killing asteroid struck at worst angle ...
Location of the Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. 1991. Hildebrand and Boynton declared the Chicxulub Crater to be the result of the impact that triggered the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. [50] Hildebrand and others estimated the diameter of the Chicxulub Crater at 170 kilometers. [39]
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