Probing the hydrothermal system of the Chicxulub impact crater

The Chicxulub impact event generated a long-duration hydrothermal system suitable for microbial life. The ~180-km-diameter Chicxulub peak-ring crater and ~240-km multiring basin, produced by the impact that terminated the Cretaceous, is the largest remaining intact impact basin on Earth. International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Expedition 364 drilled to a depth of 1335 m below the sea floor into the peak ring, providing a unique opportunity to study the thermal and chemical modification of Earth’s crust caused by the impact. The recovered core shows the crater hosted a spatially extensive hydrothermal system that chemically and mineralogically modified ~1.4 × 105 km3 of Earth’s crust, a volume more than nine times that of the Yellowstone Caldera system. Initially, high temperatures of 300° to 400°C and an independent geomagnetic polarity clock indicate the hydrothermal system was long lived, in excess of 106 years.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2020-05-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaz3053PMID 32523986PMCID 7259942
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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