Scientist contributes to dinosaur extinction impact site study

An international team of scientists have shown how a massive crater caused by the impact of the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs also deformed rocks in a way that may have produced habitats for early life. Around 65 million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico causing an impact so huge that the blast and subsequent knock-on effects wiped out around 75 per cent of all life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. This is known as the Chicxulub impact. In April and May 2016, an international team of scientists undertook an offshore expedition and drilled into part of the Chicxulub impact crater. Their mission was to retrieve samples from the rocky inner ridges of the crater - known as the 'peak ring' - drilling 506 to 1335 metres below the modern day sea floor to understand more about the ancient cataclysmic event. Now, the researchers, led by scientists from Imperial College London and including a PhD student from the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Council Centre (SUERC), have carried out the first analysis of the core samples. They found that the impact millions of years ago deformed the peak ring rocks in such a way that it made them more porous, and less dense, than any models had previously predicted.