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
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