Chicxulub impact

The impact of a large asteroid on the Yucatán Peninsula about 66 million years ago. It created the Chicxulub crater and triggered environmental disruption associated with the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

Chicxulub crater: A buried impact structure beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, roughly 180 kilometers across and about 66 million years old. The crater preserves the physical record of the impact beneath the Yucatán Peninsula.
Luis Alvarez: An American physicist who proposed that an asteroid impact caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. His team connected the boundary’s iridium enrichment to an extraterrestrial impact.
End-Cretaceous extinction: A mass extinction about 66 million years ago that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs and many other groups. This extinction is the biological crisis most strongly associated with the Chicxulub impact.
Non-avian dinosaur: A dinosaur belonging to a lineage outside the birds, all of which survived the end-Cretaceous extinction. Non-avian dinosaurs vanished in the extinction associated with Chicxulub.
Asteroid: A small rocky or metallic body orbiting the Sun, larger than a meteoroid and smaller than a planet. The impactor is generally identified as an asteroid, though its exact composition and source remain uncertain.
Impact winter: A period of global cooling caused when an impact injects sunlight-blocking material into the atmosphere. Dust, soot, and sulfate aerosols from the event reduced sunlight and disrupted ecosystems.
Walter Alvarez: An American geologist whose research helped establish an asteroid impact as the cause of the end-Cretaceous extinction. His boundary-layer observations joined geological evidence to the impact hypothesis.
Deccan Traps: A vast volcanic province in India formed by repeated eruptions near the end of the Cretaceous period. Its eruptions were a competing or contributing source of environmental stress around the extinction.
Ammonite: An extinct marine cephalopod with a coiled external shell, abundant in Mesozoic seas. Ammonites disappeared at the boundary, marking severe losses in marine ecosystems.
Impact winter duration: The length of the global cooling interval caused by sunlight-blocking material after a large impact. Estimates differ over how long Chicxulub’s atmospheric effects suppressed sunlight and productivity.

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