Geologists Weary, But Elated by Chicxulub Drilling Operations
A schematic diagram of a buried complex crater with impact breccias overlying impact melt. This is a generalized diagram of how the Chicxulub impact crater may be structured. It is buried beneath several hundred to one thousand meters of sediment, so drilling is needed to sample rocks from the impact crater. The Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project is designed to drill through the overlying sediments, the impact breccias, the impact melt, and into the underlying impact-fractured rock. Chart by University of Arizona's Space Imagery Center |
Tucson - Feb 25, 2002
The drilling crew on the Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project near Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, has been doing "a fantastic job," last week recovering between 35 and 40 meters of exceptional core samples each day, according to a University of Arizona scientist and co-investigator on the project.
The Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project (CSDP) is an international project to core 1.8-kilometers into an immense crater created by the impact of an asteroid or comet 65 million years ago. The Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) impact is thought to have led to one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth history, including dinosaur extinction.
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) is the lead institution on the $1.5 million, approximately 2-month project. The goal is to discover what the impactor was and the details of the catastrophic impact that wiped out more than 75 percent of all plant and animal species on Earth.
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