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.
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Ever since dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earth, researchers and archaeologists have been trying to figure out what exactly led to the extinction of thee, giant creatures. An asteroid impact on Earth is often believed to be the reason behind dinosaurs extinction. And now researchers believe that they have “closed the case” of what killed the dinosaurs. The researchers link the extinction with an asteroid based on one major evidence - they found asteroid dust inside the impact crater.
The new study is led by Steven Goderis, a geochemistry professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has been published in Science Advances on Feb. 24. The study is the latest to come from a 2016 International Ocean Discovery Program mission co-led by The University of Texas at Austin that collected nearly 3,000 feet of rock core from the crater buried under the seafloor.
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Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater.
The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatán Peninsula. It is called Chicxulub after a nearby town. Part of the crater is offshore and part of it is on land. The crater is buried beneath many layers of rock and sediment. A 2016 mission led by the International Ocean Discovery Program extracted rock cores from the offshore portion of the crater. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences/ Google Map.