The Chicxulub Crater and Implications for the Impact Origin of Life Hypothesis
David Kring (Lunar and Planetary Institute)
Fri, November 3, 10:30am - 11:30am
Host: Gail Christeson
Abstract: The ~180 km-diameter Chicxulub impact crater, located on the YucatáPeninsula of Mexico, is famously linked to the extinction of dinosaurs and most other forms of life on Earth nearly 66 million years ago. The International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program recently teamed up to drill into the crater to test models of how such large impact basins form and how the hydrothermal systems they harbor may have provided critical biological niches. While past attention has often been on the environmental calamity the Chicxulub impact produced during the first day of the Cenozoic, it is now recognized that the crater and the hydrothermal system it hosted may be proxies for the geological processes that shaped the Hadean and the earliest evolution of life on Earth.
