Chicxulub Crater, Mexico

Chicxulub crater in Mexico, Yucatan Peninsula, was formed as a result of a meteorite crush about 65 million years ago. Chicxulub is quite young in comparison with other large craters of our planet. According to scientists, this catastrophe could have been the cause of the partial or complete extinction of dinosaurs. The disaster had a huge scale. Researchers suggest that a fallen meteorite could have caused a tsunami with waves up to 100 meters high.

A dust cloud around the planet blocked the sunlight and, so, the air temperature on the Earth has gone down dramatically. It’s now incredibly difficult to determine the extent of the disaster, as well as the size of the original crater. Over millions of years, an erosion and other geological factors were constantly changing the meteorite area. Some scientists assume that the diameter of the original crater could reach 300 km. Now, the apparent diameter of the crater is about 180 km.

The structure has been found relatively recently, in 1987, during one of the geophysical expeditions arranged to search for oil deposits. As a result, the symmetrical arch was discovered by researchers at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Then scientists moved to land. It was decided to name a discovered crater after the nearby settlement of Chicxulub. This name literally translates from Mayan as a demon of ticks. Since discovery, large-scale studies of the crater do not stop even for a moment. The investigation made it possible to clarify the theory of the Cretaceous-Paleogene crisis, which killed the dinosaurs and a number of the few and most vulnerable species of animals and plants. Next - Aorounga Crater