Chicxulub crater Chicxulub crater The Chicxulub crater (; ) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named. It was formed by a large asteroid or comet about in diameter, the Chicxulub impactor, striking the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), slightly less than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant
Wilkes Land crater researchers led by Ralph von Frese and Laramie Potts of Ohio State University. The team used gravity measurements by NASA's GRACE satellites to identify a wide mass concentration and noted that this mass anomaly is centered within a larger ring-like structure visible in radar images of the land surface beneath the Antarctic ice cap. This combination suggested to them that the feature may mark the site of a wide impact crater buried beneath the ice and more than 2.5 times larger than the Chicxulub crater. Due to the site's location beneath the Antarctic ice sheet there are no direct samples