The Formation of the Chicxulub Crater and an Avenue for Life
November 17, 2016
In a paper published today in the journal Science, an international team of scientists show how the basement of Earth’s crust was uplifted over the surface to produce a shattered peak ring in the Chicxulub impact crater that was susceptible to hydrothermal alteration.
The Chicxulub crater was produced ~65 million years ago when an enormous asteroid or comet struck the submerged Yucatán Peninsula and extinguished most life on Earth. While most efforts have been directed at that environmental calamity and the extinction of life, it has been difficult to probe the crater itself, which lies buried beneath ~1 kilometer of sedimentary rock.
Co-author Dr. David A. Kring of Universities Space Research Association (USRA)/Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), one of the first people to recognize the impact origin of the Chicxulub structure 25 years ago, “still finds amazing the impact’s energy and its ability to reshape the Earth’s crust so quickly. It is easy to be startled by a process that altered the evolution of our planet.”
Earlier this year, a joint expedition of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) drilled into the peak ring of the Chicxulub crater. A primary goal of the expedition was to test models of peak-ring formation using nearly 14 tons of rock core recovered from depths between 506 and 1335 meters beneath the sea floor.

Schematic diagram showing how the granitic basement (pink) punched upward and flowed over the pre-impact surface (yellow) of Earth to form the peak ring that was encountered in the 1335 meter-deep M0077A borehole off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The underlying mantle of the Earth is dark green. Material that was shock-melted is shown in red and material that was shock-metamorphosed is shown in blue. This rendering is based on a computer simulation of the impact that is consistent with the borehole observations. The gridded mesh produced by the simulation helps illustrate how rock flowed. Illustration credit: USRA/LPI/Imperial College London
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