This 3-5-metre-deep and 3-5-kilometre-wide trough on the Yucatan Peninsula traces weaknesses in the rock created by the space impactor that many scientists now believe wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the planet.
Don't know if I buy it but its interesting.

This article includes a more persuasive image of the crater.

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"So-called" crater? Are you suggesting that it isn't? It think it's been verified to be an impact crater about as conclusively as any such feature can be.

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Just 5 meters deep? I would think that the impact that wiped a whole species of lifeform on Earth shouls be much larger.

I took the term "so-called" to refer to the name given the crater, not to question whether or not it is a crater.

The crater was much deeper and has been filled in by sediments as the article discusses. This article is actually talking about features resulting from weaknesses created in the rock from the impact. Very interesting!

Working Link to Chicxulub Crater Main Site

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Yes, I agree. Just the other day I came very close to falling off the edge.

But Slappy also said, "Don't know if I buy it but its interesting."

As Dave said, this impact crater has many features that make it a certainty. There is also evidence it created a tidal wave that went many miles inland around the gulf there. There are a few palentologists who aren't convinced the asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction because many species were decreasing in number before the impact.

I think the argument is much stronger in favor of the asteroid as the cause of missing dinos. The one palentologist you always see on TV that doesn't think the asteroid was the culprit thinks infectious disease may have played a role as species came into contact with other species. But that doesn't fit the germ model because it wouldn't have wiped out so many different species at the same time.

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FWIW The "gulf of Mexico" as such did not exist 65 mya. Most of central North America was covered by the "Great Inland Sea", which stretched up to southern Canada.

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That's what 65 million years of erosion will do. This one was underwater at the time and is still mostly underwater today; I'm actually surprised that it's survived this well.

I'll take this as a challenge to find a source for geological evidence of the great tsunami from this impact. Give me a day or two. I was guessing the details like how far inland but I remember there was correlating geological evidence for a 'mega-tsunami'.


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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: beskeptical on 2003-03-14 05:20 ]</font>

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http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf015/sf015p11.htm

Might be trumped by a decade or two.

I dunno, Gerta Keller has been going after it for a long time. I imagine we could dig up some old articles of hers too.

Hum,
the Iceland impact theory may be correct, but a it seems to me that a `better` explanation is that the magma hotspot that once was under Scotland and formed the Glencoe supervolcano is now under Iceland .
Without any evidence other than the dating of the rock formations and an increase of iridium concentration in northern latitudes it is entertaining speculation.
(of course, it is still possible for an impact to have happen there).

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Grammatically, it would have been gooder to say, "The crater called Chicxulub..."

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Hum,
perhaps it would be better to just say "The Chicxulub crater".

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

The Deccan traps (The remains of the massive volcanic event in India) were created round about 65 million years ago and may indeed have had something to do with the demise of the dinosaurs.

I did hear a theory that the traps were in fact created by the chicxulub impact as India at that time would have been at the antipode to the event.

Interesting idea but Im not sure the impactor would have been big enough to create such an event. The Caloris basin on Mercury does have an antipodal structure but it (Caloris) is a huge crater some 1300 km across.

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Hum,
interesting idea though.

But easier to just have another impactor - The Shiva crater is a hypothesised impact crater located in the Indian Ocean west of India. It has been suggested that it formed around 65 million years ago, the same time as a number of other impacts that are recorded in the K-T boundary.
The Deccan Traps are located in the theorised centre of the crater, lending support to the idea that the traps were created by the impact event.

Read more

Attached Images

115978759_a965e805e5_o.jpg (27.7 KB, 7 views)

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...