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 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