Yucatan 'Dino-Crater' Drill Project Declared a Success Jonathan Amos - BBC Science
go to original May 25, 2016

Rock recovered from the peak ring of the Chicxulub Crater (Max Alexander/Asteroid Day)

The effort to drill into the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Mexico has been declared an outstanding success.

A UK/US-led team has spent the past seven weeks coring into the deep bowl cut out of the Earth's surface 66 million years ago by the asteroid that hastened the end of the dinosaurs.

Rocks nearly 1,300m below the Gulf seafloor have been pulled up.



The outer rim (white arc) of the crater lies under the Yucatan Peninsula itself, but the inner peak ring is best accessed offshore (NASA)

The samples are expected to reveal new insights on the scale of the impact and its environmental effects..

The operations manager on the project, Dave Smith, said drilling would likely end at midnight on Wednesday.

"The core recovery, we're all really chuffed about - the almost 100% core recovery and the quality of the cores we've been getting up.

"It's been a remarkable success. We've got deeper than I thought we might do," the British Geological Survey man said.

Read the rest at BBC Science

Related: Fossils Reveal Even Creatures in the Antarctic Were Wiped Out by Giant Impact That Killed Off the Dinosaurs (Daily Mail)

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