Difference between revisions of "Chicxulub crater"

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The Chicxulub crater (pronunciation: /ˈtʃiːkʃᵿluːb/; Mayan: [tʃʼikʃuluɓ]) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

Description

Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named.

The date of the Chicxulub impactor, which created it, coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), around 66 million years ago.

The crater is more than 180 kilometers (110 miles) in diameter and 20 km (12 mi) in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10-30 km depth.

It makes the feature the third of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth; the impacting bolide that formed the crater was at least 10 km (6 mi) in diameter.

Discovery

The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater, and gave up his search.

Later, through contact with Alan Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the impact origin of the crater includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.

See also

• Bolide

External links

• Chicxulub crater @ Wikipedia