Chicxulub impactor Chicxulub impactor The Chicxulub impactor ( ), also known as the K/Pg impactor and (more speculatively) as the Chicxulub asteroid, was an asteroid or other celestial body some in diameter which struck the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub crater. It impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico, after which the impactor and its crater are named. Because the estimated date of the object's impact and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) coincide, there is a scientific consensus that its impact was the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
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