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 50 megatons of TNT). The object dug a hole wide and deep, leaving a crater mainly under the sea and covered by of sediment by the 21st century. The impact would have caused a megatsunami over tall that would have reached all the way to what are now Texas and Florida. The height of the tsunami was limited by the relatively shallow sea in the area of the impact; in deep ocean it would have been tall. A cloud of super-heated dust, ash and steam would have spread from the crater as the impactor burrowed underground in less than a