Death Of The Dinosaurs: Yucatan Crater

The end of the Cretaceous Period marked the end of the age of Dinosaurs

, as most people are aware. Mass extinctions all over the planet (confirmed by science) occurred at approximately the same time; smaller creatures were somehow able to live, and evolved into many of the animals alive today. It is now believed that the catastrophic event, which ushered out the dinosaurs, happened just off the Yucatan peninsula, located in Mexico.

In the 1970s, scientist Luis Alvarez proposed a hypothesis for this worldwide catastrophe, postulating that a massive extraterrestrial body had slammed into the Earth, causing such environmental damage that it wiped out most life forms. Coincidentally, a massive underwater arc spanning 40 miles across, happened to be found in 1978 by some geophysicists who were doing research in the Yucatan peninsula. Working with maps, they found another arc in the ground, and the two connected to form a 111-mile wide impact crater, centered close to the small town of Chicxulub. The meteor had struck about 65 million years ago--right about when the dinosaurs died out.

The scientific community was intrigued by the possibility that the Chicxulub crater was the site of the impact, now called the K-T extinction event, which so drastically re-shaped the earth. The extraterrestrial body had a diameter of over 6 miles, and hit the planet with a force equivalent to 96 teratons of TNT - any bombs created by humans pale in comparison though, as the impact was a billion times more powerful. It would have caused mega-tsunamis which reached thousands of feet high, and kicked up a cloud of boiling hot dust and steam into the atmosphere as the impactor burrowed deep underground. Huge earthquakes across the globe would have occurred and wildfires would have been sparked in mere seconds.

The sun was blocked out by carbon and ash floating in the atmosphere, killed most plants and eventually most plant-eaters. Huge predators like Tyrannosaurus Rex soon perished without prey. Geological samples from this time period show a defined layer of shocked quartz and other rocks that would not normally be congregated in such a small area, but which were kicked up by the worldwide destruction caused by the event. It has been decided (following analysis of massive amounts of data over 20 years), by a panel of international experts, that Chicxulub crater was indeed the trigger for the K-T extinction. It's incredible to think, with many questions still outstanding concerning the Cretaceous age, that we can confirm, and understand, what happened so long ago.

by: Robert Nickel

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