Scientists are currently hard at work digging deep into the ancient asteroid crater that could shed light on the extinction of dinosaurs that took place approximately 65 million years ago. The team is made up of 33 researchers who are collecting rock samples from the Chicxulub crater located in the Yucatán Peninsula for clues to the ancient event.
"The extinction event caused 75 percent of life to go extinct on Earth, including the dinosaurs," said geophysicist Sean Gulick of the University of Texas and co-leader of the expedition. "Thus, determining the potential causes, or kill mechanisms, is a very important step forward in our understanding of the history of life on Earth."
"One aspect that we are studying by driving into the Chicxulub impact crater is the impact event itself - including potential kill mechanisms and the recovery of life after the asteroid struck," he added.
Although the crater site has been studied before - beginning in the 1980s - the current $10 million expedition is going even deeper, examining the Chicxulub "peak ring," a geological formation that is created from large-sized asteroid impacts and has never been studied before.
"It is the best-preserved large impact on Earth, the only one linked to a mass extinction event, and the only one with a confirmed peak ring," Gulick said.
"We went through a remarkable amount of the post-impact world," he added. "All the way into the Eocene times - so between 50 and 55 million years ago. We've got all these limestones and rocks that contain the fossils from the world after the impact, all the things that evolved from the few organisms that survived."
"In 1996, and again in 2005, we used seismic data to image beneath the limestone that bury the crater to see its key features, including the ring-shaped faults, crater rim, and peak ring," said geophysicist Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London and co-leader of the expedition. "We decided if we could drill in only one location, drilling into the peak ring was the best target."
"It was shallow, so the drilling would take less time and cost less," she added. "It would tell us whether the impact models were correct and it had the best chance for preserving evidence of impacts being used as habits for life that can live off chemical reactions, as opposed to sunlight (chemosynthetic organisms)."
The team hopes to complete their sample collection in June so they can send them off for analysis as soon as possible and uncover evolutionary patterns and determine what happened after the ancient asteroid impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs.
