What's in the crater left by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?
Scientists are aiming to drill into the crater left by the asteroid that may have killed off the dinosaurs in an effort to learn more about the mass extinction, and the revival of life in the aftermath of the cosmic collision.
Researchers from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) will travel to the small Mexican town of Chicxulub in the state of Yucat谩n this spring to left by a massive bolide, or impactor, around 66 million years ago.
Scientists have not yet confirmed that the Chicxulub bolide was responsible for the mass extinction seen at the end of the Cretaceous period leading into the Paleogene era, but that the 6-mile wide impactor brought about the extinctions associated with that time is widely accepted, if still controversial. The crater the IODP scientists hope to learn more about is centered off of Mexico鈥檚 coast near Chicxulub and is more than 100 miles wide and 12 miles deep, making it the third-largest such structure on Earth.
What separates the Chicxulub crater from other similar ones around the world and what makes scientists hopeful for the program鈥檚 results are its distinctive peak rings 鈥� rocky ridges left in the wake of the bolide impact that still remain today.
鈥淐hicxulub is the that we can get to. All the other ones are either on another planet, or they鈥檝e been eroded,鈥� said Sean 鈥℅ulick, a geology research professor at The University of Texas at Austin and co-chief scientist on the $10 million IODP endeavor, to Science. Analyzing the peak rings, which are common features on other planets and the Moon but eroded on Earth except for Chicxulub, could provide new geological and environmental insight about life after the bolide impact.
鈥淵ou can assume that at ground zero of this impact we are dealing with a sterile ocean, and . We might learn something for the future,鈥� Gulick told CNN. 鈥淐ertain events can have lasting effects on our planets morphology, stratigraphic layers, and, of course, life.鈥�
A specialized IODP boat outfitted with three large pylons will sail from the Yucat谩n coast this April to an offshore location above a peak ring. There, the pylons will be lowered into the rock and the boat will lift up and out of the water to form a stable drilling platform from which the IODP team will send a diamond-tipped bit nearly 1 mile deep into the peak ring to drill and extract rock over the course of the two-month expedition. Those samples will aid in research to learn more about peak ring structure and the genetic history of the microbes that may live there.
While no asteroids or other objects on the scale of the Chicxulub impactor are expected to collide with Earth for the foreseeable future, discovering more about what happened millions of years ago would provide a foundation for understanding environmental mechanisms that have only been theorized to this point.
鈥淲e pretty much knew what would happen if another asteroid of this size hit us today 鈥� it would not be good 鈥� but our work contributes to a larger body of work dedicated to understanding the many geologic and ecologic processes that happen when such large-magnitude events occur,鈥� geologist Jason Sanford told CNN.
