T. Rex and the Crater of Doom the Brazos river that a tsunami has swept across the Gulf of Mexico millions of years earlier. The discovery was made thanks to a graduate student named Alan Hildebrand that notified Alvarez of the evidence of a crater on the Yucatan peninsula, which had never been published in the scientific literature by the Mexican petroleum geologists that had found it. The age of the crater needed to be determined if it was going to be a candidate for the KT boundary impact, but access to the region was limited by the crater being buried over time and the core samples
Chicxulub crater of bolide-weakened lithostratigraphy around the impact crater wall. More recent evidence suggests the actual crater is wide, and the 180 km ring is in fact an inner wall of it. Researchers at the University of Glasgow dated tektite samples from the impact as 66,038,000 ± 11,000 years old. The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of , and delivered an estimated energy of 21–921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs (between formula_1 and formula_2 joules, or 1.3–58 YJ). By contrast, the most powerful man-made explosive device ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had an energy of only 210 petajoules (formula_3 joules, the yield of