Dinosaur Crater Drilling

A joint UK-US-led expedition to drill into “dinosaur crater” gets underway.

17:15 07 April 2016

The UK-US-led project is now underway to drill into the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Mexico, a deep scar made in the Earth’s surface 66 million years ago by the asteroid, which scientists believed hastened the end of dinosaurs.

 

The researchers goal is to access the crater’s rocks to have a better understanding of the scale of impact and the environmental catastrophe that ensued.

 

Prof Joanna Morgan, the co-lead investigator from Imperial College London, said: "We want to know where the rocks that make up this peak ring come from," 

 

"Are they from the lower, mid or upper crust? Knowing that will help us understand how large craters are formed, and that's important for us to be able to say what was the total impact energy, and what was the total volume of rock that was excavated and put into the Earth's stratosphere to cause the environmental damage," 

 

He added: "This is very interesting for Chicxulub, but it's also fascinating to consider in terms of the early Earth or even Mars. On the early Earth, there would have been many more, larger impacts. We think life may well have originated in impact craters."