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 50 megatons of TNT). The object dug a hole wide and deep, leaving a crater mainly under the sea and covered by of sediment by the 21st century. The impact would have caused a megatsunami over tall that would have reached all the way to what are now Texas and Florida. The height of the tsunami was limited by the relatively shallow sea in the area of the impact; in deep ocean it would have been tall. A cloud of super-heated dust, ash and steam would have spread from the crater as the impactor burrowed underground in less than a