Impact event Chicxulub Crater. This crater is centered on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and was discovered by Tony Camargo and Glen Pentfield while working as geophysicists for the Mexican oil company PEMEX. What they reported as a circular feature later turned out to be a crater estimated to be in diameter. This convinced the vast majority of scientists that this extinction resulted from a point event that is most probably an extraterrestrial impact and not from increased volcanism and climate change (which would spread its main effect over a much longer time period). Although there is now general agreement that there
Chicxulub crater analysis, arguing that there might only be gaps of hours to days between impacts in a multiple-impact scenario (cf. Shoemaker-Levy 9) which would not leave a detectable gap in deposits. Chicxulub is the only known Earth crater with a remaining impact peak ring, but it is under of sediment. During April and May 2016, a joint IODP-ICDP Mission Specific Platform Expedition no. 364 obtained the first offshore core samples from the peak ring, the central zone of the crater. During Expedition 364, DES drillers on the "L/B Myrtle" collected core samples to enable ECORD Science Party members to study how