Boltysh crater Boltysh crater The Boltysh Crater (Bovtyshka Crater) is an impact crater in the Kirovohrad Oblast of Ukraine, near the village of Bovtyshka. The crater is in diameter and its age of 65.17 ± 0.64 million years, based on argon dating techniques, is within error of that of Chicxulub Crater in Mexico, and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary). The Chicxulub impact is believed to have caused the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, which included the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Boltysh impact likely occurred several thousand years before Chicxulub, suggesting the extinction event may have been driven
Boltysh crater that they formed at exactly the same time. At the estimated rate of impacts on the Earth, it would not be extremely unusual for a Boltysh-sized crater to be formed within half a million years of Chicxulub. The dating of these impact craters is not yet accurate enough to establish whether the impactors arrived thousands of years apart, perhaps as part of a generally elevated rate of impacts at that time, or were almost simultaneous, like the impacts of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994. The discovery of the unconfirmed Silverpit crater and the early report