THE CHICXULUB IMPACT
The meteorite that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago was 12 km in diameter. The impact released an amount of energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs.
- Current coastline
- Coastline 66 million years ago
What happened?
It created a crater that was 180 km in diameter, blasting out and vaporising millions of tonnes of rock that produced a fiery cloud that surrounded the planet. Locally, the effects were devastating. There was a shower of fiery particles, massive fires, gigantic earthquakes, huge landslides and tsunamis over 1,000 metres high.
Local consequences
- Fireball
- Shock waves
- Earthquakes
- Tsunamis
- Rain of ejecta
Fires
- Protoxins
- Soot production
- CO2 and CO emissions
Dust
- Darkening
- End of photosynthesis
- Cooling
NO2 production
- Acid rain
- Ozone depletion
SO2 production
- Cooling
- Acid rain
Release of heavy metals
- Poisoning
CI gas and Br gas production
- Ozone depletion
Greenhouse effect?
- Immediate
- Months
- Years
- Decades
The hidden crater
The Chicxulub crater is currently buried under hundreds of metres of rock and sediment, but thanks to various gravimetric studies and boreholes we have gained a good understanding of its characteristics.
Tanis
The Tanis site in North Dakota provides a perfect snapshot of the devastation. It shows thousands of dead animal and plant fossils 60 minutes after the impact.
It is of such exceptional quality that the fish still have small molten rock spherules from the impact in their gills.
Mimbral
Mimbral is about 1,000 km from Yucatan and was instrumental in linking the extinction to the Chicxulub impact.
- Mass extinction and iridium spike.
- Deposits from a huge tsunami with fragments of vegetation swept away from the continent’s forests.
- Accumulation of tektites: droplets of molten material that arrived directly from the impact zone.
- Marine sediments from before the impact.
- Accumulation of tektites in Mimbral.
- Tsunami deposit with plant debris from the Gulf of Mexico.