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The Yucatan Peninsula offers some of the most stunning megalithic structures and cultural phenomena in the New World. Even these great man made monuments and achievements are dwarfed by a natural landmark that not only changed the landscape, but the development and future of the planet.

The Chicxulub crater is an ancient impact crater buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The epicenter of the impact is located very near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named. The Chicxulub structure was formed some 65 million years ago when a large celestial body impacted the Yucatan Peninsula with an unprecedented amount of force. The energy released by the impact was in excess of 100 million megatons of power. In comparison, the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima was a 20-kiloton device.

The crater was discovered by Glen Penfield, in 1970. Penfield was a geophysicist who had been working in the Yucatan while exploring for oil in the region. With the help of a colleague, Alan Hildebrand, Penfield retrieved evidence for the impact origin of the crater in the forms of shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in the surrounding areas.

The impact caused the abrupt end of the Cretaceous period and ushered in the Tertiary period of the earth’s geological history. Many scientists believe that this single impact event is responsible for destroying approximately 80 percent of all living species in the ocean, as well as many unique terrestrial species, including the dinosaurs as suggested by the K-T boundary, the geological boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.

Some scientists speculate that the impact was not the sole reason for the mass extinction of life at this time and that whether there was a single impact or whether series of impactors that may have struck the Earth at around the same time. Recent evidence suggests that the impactor 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.

The resulting impact produced fire storms, acid rain and destructive tsunamis. The collision created a crater nearly 8 miles deep and sent over 12,000 cubic miles of rock, dirt and debris spinning into the earth’s atmosphere. This large amount of debris material obscured the sun and causing extreme fluctuations in the Earth’s climate. Proponent scientists believe this series of events resulted the in mass extinctions at the time.

The effects of the massive collision were immediate and drastic. The impact was so great that it fundamentally displaced the shape of the earth’s crust up to 22 miles below the surface of the planet. The Chicxulub crater is the first location where deformation at the base of the crust has been found in a terrestrial impact crater.

In 2000, a scientific team collected seismic reflection, refraction, gravity and magnetic data from over the crater and surrounding areas. This research has provided the first direct evidence of a crater with the multi-ring basin shape that is typical of the largest impact craters found on the moon and on Venus. The team discovered that the Chicxulub crater is about 125 miles in diameter and carved out a cavity from the about 7.5 miles below sea level. Mount Everest, in comparison, is 5.5 miles high.

In March 2010, following extensive analysis of the available evidence covering 20 years worth of data spanning the fields of paleontology, geochemistry, climate modeling, geophysics and sedimentology, 41 international experts from 33 institutions reviewed available evidence and concluded that the impact at Chicxulub triggered the mass extinctions at the K-T boundary including those of dinosaurs.

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