In 2016, Sean Gulick and a team of researchers extracted asteroid dust from sections of dark brown, silty claystone and greyish-green marlstone buried beneath the ocean in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Now, five years later, that dust has answered perhaps one of humankind’s most poignant questions: What killed the dinosaurs?
Gulick, a research professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, spent over a decade sending out proposals for the mission, so when it finally commenced, and he was bunked six-to-a-cabin and sharing one bathroom with his fellow scientists for two months on a lift boat perched 15 meters above the water—much higher still above the crater they were drilling into—the intimate quarters were forgiven in lieu of the excitement of discovery. Each layer they drilled into revealed a new mystery.