Dinosaur Doomsday Crater Became an Ocean Oasis for 700,000 Years

Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid between six and ten miles (10 to 15 kilometers) wide slammed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind a massive 90-mile-wide (150 kilometers) crater. The impact killed all non-avian dinosaurs and decimated marine creatures—but may have also boosted life in a peculiar way. A team of international researchers suggests that the asteroid impact created a hydrothermal system within the Chicxulub crater, as it’s officially known, which may have nurtured a unique marine environment in the ocean above it for at least 700,000 years. The study, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, shows how a highly destructive event might eventually become a catalyst for life. “After the asteroid impact, the Gulf of Mexico records an ecological recovery process that is quite different from that of the global ocean,” Honami Sato, lead author in the study and a geologist from Kyushu University, said in a University of Texas at Austin statement. In the ... Read full article.