Chicxulub crater
Radar topography reveals the 180 kilometer (112 mi) ring of the
crater; clustered around the crater’s trough are numerous
sinkholes, suggesting a prehistoric oceanic basin in the depres-
sion left by the impact (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech).
The Chicxulub Crater ( [tʃikʃuˈlub]) is an ancient impact
crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mex-
ico.[1] Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub,
after which the crater is named — as well as the rough
translation of the Mayan name, "the tail of the devil."[2]
The crater is more than 180 kilometers (110 mi) in dia-
meter, making the feature one of the largest confirmed
impact structures in the world; the impacting bolide
that formed the crater was at least 10 km (6 mi) in
diameter.
The crater was discovered by Glen Penfield, a geo-
physicist who had been working in the Yucatán while
looking for oil during the late 1970s. Evidence for the
impact origin of the crater includes shocked quartz, a
gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas. The
age of the rocks and isotope analysis show that this im-
pact structure dates from the end of the Cretaceous Peri-
od, roughly 65 million years ago. The impact associated
with the crater is implicated in causing the extinction of
the dinosaurs as suggested by the K–T boundary, al-
though some critics argue that the impact was not the
sole reason[3] and others debate whether there was a
single impact or whether the Chicxulub impactor was
one of several that may have struck the Earth at around
the same time. Recent evidence suggests that the im-
pactor may have been a piece of a much larger asteroid
that broke up in a collision in distant space more than
160 million years ago.[4]
Discovery
In 1978, geophysicist Glen Penfield was working for the
Mexican state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos,
or Pemex, as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the
Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán peninsula.[5] Pen-
field’s job was to use geophysical data to scout possible
locations for oil drilling.[6