Washington — Scientists have begun drilling a mile-deep hole into a huge underground crater that was left by a mountain-sized asteroid or comet that slammed into Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Earlier this month, they reached the uppermost layer of broken rocks buried beneath Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that were smashed, twisted and hurled about by the tremendous force of the collision.
The researchers hope to learn exactly what the space invader did when it penetrated the Earth's crust in a fiery ball of unimaginable violence. The goal is to better understand how the impact devastated the global environment, clearing the way for the rise of mammals, including humans.
The ancient catastrophe marked "the transition between the Age of Reptiles and the Age of Mammals," said David Kring, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a leader of the drilling team from Mexico and the United States.
Researchers expect to find a thick stony sheet that was melted by the intense heat of the long-ago crash.
The volume of the molten material could have been as much as 24,000 cubic miles, enough to fill the Hudson Bay or the Gulf of California with lava.
Poisonous gases, dust, smoke and fire from the impact blotted out the sun, lowered temperatures and contaminated the air for months or years, killing more than 75 percent of the plant and animal species in existence.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.