Impact event Chicxulub Crater. This crater is centered on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and was discovered by Tony Camargo and Glen Pentfield while working as geophysicists for the Mexican oil company PEMEX. What they reported as a circular feature later turned out to be a crater estimated to be in diameter. This convinced the vast majority of scientists that this extinction resulted from a point event that is most probably an extraterrestrial impact and not from increased volcanism and climate change (which would spread its main effect over a much longer time period). Although there is now general agreement that there
Chicxulub crater of asteroid impacts and high-yield nuclear detonations. In 1990, "Houston Chronicle" reporter Carlos Byars told Hildebrand of Penfield's earlier discovery of a possible impact crater. Hildebrand contacted Penfield in April 1990 and the pair soon secured two drill samples from the Pemex wells, stored in New Orleans. Hildebrand's team tested the samples, which clearly showed shock-metamorphic materials. A team of California researchers including Kevin Pope, Adriana Ocampo, and Charles Duller, surveying regional satellite images in 1996, found a cenote (sinkhole) ring centered on Chicxulub that matched the one Penfield saw earlier; the cenotes were thought to be caused by subsidence