Boltysh crater Boltysh crater The Boltysh Crater (Bovtyshka Crater) is an impact crater in the Kirovohrad Oblast of Ukraine, near the village of Bovtyshka. The crater is in diameter and its age of 65.17 ± 0.64 million years, based on argon dating techniques, is within error of that of Chicxulub Crater in Mexico, and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary). The Chicxulub impact is believed to have caused the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, which included the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Boltysh impact likely occurred several thousand years before Chicxulub, suggesting the extinction event may have been driven
Chicxulub crater of asteroid impacts and high-yield nuclear detonations. In 1990, "Houston Chronicle" reporter Carlos Byars told Hildebrand of Penfield's earlier discovery of a possible impact crater. Hildebrand contacted Penfield in April 1990 and the pair soon secured two drill samples from the Pemex wells, stored in New Orleans. Hildebrand's team tested the samples, which clearly showed shock-metamorphic materials. A team of California researchers including Kevin Pope, Adriana Ocampo, and Charles Duller, surveying regional satellite images in 1996, found a cenote (sinkhole) ring centered on Chicxulub that matched the one Penfield saw earlier; the cenotes were thought to be caused by subsidence