The journey into the Gulf of Mexico's sea floor in order to shed light on 65 million years of history is now underway. Using a massive drill, a research team hopes to obtain a mile-deep core sample from the Chicxulub crater and uncover the mystery of the end of the dinosaur era.
"There's a lot of questions about mass extinction events, including all the extinction or kill mechanisms out there," said Sean Gulick, one of the research team's leaders from the University of Texas at Austin.
At the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago, a miles-wide asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out more than 70 percent of the planet's species and sending deep-seated rocks and other materials flying like water in a pond after a stone hits it.
If the team successfully gathers a core sample from deep within the crater, they could successfully shed insight on numerous topics in a variety of fields including prehistoric biology and planetary biology.
The core samples will give scientists access to Chicxulub's well-preserved peak ring, the circle of hills that typically rises above flat impact craters on Earth and other planets.
"In that section," Gulick said, "the big excitement is, 'How did life come back at ground zero?' Was it the specialists that came back first, the generalists? Is there any clue to what organisms repopulated first, as opposed to what the environmental consequences were for the ocean?"
The team is using a 137-foot craft called the Liftboat Myrtle to drill into the seafloor, taking advantage of its tripod with 6-foot-wide legs to get itself into the position over an offshore site 25 kilometers from Progreso, Mexico. Researchers hope to have the first usable samples by next week.
As the team drills, they will make their way through numerous layers of the crater that they hope will reveal evidence of - in addition to the clues to the nature of the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs - the geological processes and ecological periods of our planet.
At 600 meters, the team will pass through rock that existed when temperatures across the globe spiked, which could help the team gain insight into the effects of climate change.
"We don't really know what this material will look like," said Jaime Urrutia-Fucugauchi, a geophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. "It could be a real surprise."
The expedition began April 6 and will continue until June.
