Twenty-five years after the discovery of the Chicxulub crater was announced at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), one of the principals of that work, David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), is releasing five dozen illustrations that faculty and students can use for educational purposes.

The illustrations will support classroom discussions of the (1) Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, (2) Chicxulub crater, (3) Chicxulub environmental effects, and (4) Chicxulub drilling. The products are available in the LPI’s Classroom Illustrations library.

The LPI has also used those images to update its Chicxulub and K-T boundary educational website.

The discovery of shocked quartz-bearing breccias and impact melt from the interior of the structure was announced at the 1991 LPSC. Within a week of that event’s silver anniversary, scientists will be drilling into the Chicxulub crater in a joint International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)–International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) expedition. Kring is an impact petrologist on the science party of that expedition.

This is the second major drilling project since the discovery of the Chicxulub impact site. The first effort was an ICDP project in 2001–2002 that was led by LPI’s Buck Sharpton, along with co-Principal Investigators Jaime Urrutia Fucugauchi, Dante Jaime Morán-Zenteno, Richard Buffler, Dieter Stöffler, and Jan Smit. Representative pictures from that initiative are also included in the newly released collection of classroom Illustrations.