It is known that dinosaurs were annihilated by an asteroid impact on Earth about 66 million years ago, in what became known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which ended 75% of the existing life on our planet at the time.
Where did the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs fall?
Called Chicxulub, the asteroid that put an end to more than 165 million years of the presence of dinosaurs on Earth, altering the evolution of life on the planet, fell in the region of the Yucatán Peninsula, in Central America, forming one of the largest known impact structures in the world, today buried: the Chicxulub Crater, 180 km in diameter.
The crater was discovered by Glen Penfield, a geophysicist who had worked in the Yucatán looking for oil in the late 1970s. Initially, he was unable to obtain evidence that this geological formation was indeed a crater and ended up abandoning the search.
Contacting Alan Hildebrand, a planetary scientist and associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Calgary in Canada who specializes in the study of asteroid impact craters, fireballs and meteorite recovery, Penfield obtained samples that would prove that the structure would be, in fact, an impact crater.
Among the evidence are impact quartz, a gravitational anomaly, and tektites from the surrounding areas – glass rocks typically formed in the aftermath of large meteoroid impacts on the Earth's surface.
According to reports, the shock where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs fell was so strong that it released a force equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs. Still, scholars debate whether the Chicxulub asteroid was really the great villain of history or just one of several that may have collided with Earth at that time.
Read more:
- Would dinosaurs still be here today if not for the asteroid? It's not like that
- Asteroid that killed dinosaurs caused devastating wildfires
- Researchers may have found fragments of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs
Several studies have raised the possibility that it was a piece of a much larger asteroid that broke up in a collision in distant space more than 160 million years ago.
In 2010, 41 international experts from 33 institutions reviewed available data and concluded that the Chicxulub impact triggered the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinctions, including that of the dinosaurs.
Fonte: Astronomy
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