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
Chicxulub crater analysis, arguing that there might only be gaps of hours to days between impacts in a multiple-impact scenario (cf. Shoemaker-Levy 9) which would not leave a detectable gap in deposits. Chicxulub is the only known Earth crater with a remaining impact peak ring, but it is under of sediment. During April and May 2016, a joint IODP-ICDP Mission Specific Platform Expedition no. 364 obtained the first offshore core samples from the peak ring, the central zone of the crater. During Expedition 364, DES drillers on the "L/B Myrtle" collected core samples to enable ECORD Science Party members to study how