Chicxulub and its surrounding structures

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Chicxulub and the Gulf of Mexico

I think that it is possible to make an informed guess that the Gulf of México owes its doubly arced shape to the K-T impact explosion shockwave. The impact crater represents the circular portion of the larger structure. Sixty five million years of sedimentation and continental drift have messed up the crater a lot, but the combination of two gravitational anomaly images from different sources fit the observations made concerning ejecta such as glass beads found in Wyoming, Arkansas and Haiti as well as the double KT boundary in North America. The ejecta field is skewed to the West because of the rotation of the Earth under the material injected to the atmosphere and into orbit.

If you look on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean off Florida, there appears to be a gravitational anomaly (party dress pink) arc which centers on the impact crater, as do several arcs in the Gulf of México. In fact, features such as the Alacrán Reef and Florida appear to be parts of the extended structure of the complex crater. The Blake Nose drill sites for cores of the K-T boundary are on the pink arc on the Atlantic side of Florida.

With still higher resolution imaging, it is possible to reconstruct the original crater rim.
LEFT: Click on this image to view at full size. (1.15 MB)

The red arrow shows the hi res image of the Chicxulub impact crater itself imposed on a larger, lower resolution image of the Caribbean and Atlantic. There is a groove leading into the crater which shows the direction and the low angle from which the asteroid or comet (rocky core type) hit. The hi res image covers the Yucatán Peninsula. Note the ejection plume pointing north and west out of the crater at the southwestern United States. Blue shades in the image represent less dense material and red shades represent denser materials.

Another version of this image with the outline of Yucatán is HERE.

Chicxulub-Yucatan location boundary
LEFT: So you don't have to look for the LPI gravitational anomaly image on the previous page, here it is at half size and combined with another map to locate it on the Yucatan Peninsula (click on it to view at full size).
The various markings on it indicate testing sites done by a group of scholars. The superimposed black lines are from a map matched to the exact coastline of Yucatán.

The crater has some extraordinary features. A trench leads into it, crossed by concentric rings which are in turn crossed by an ejection plume. This gives an order of events, among other things, and hints at a much larger catastrophe than has been supposed. The ejection plume is a big clue to the dynamics that were generated by the 10+ km asteroid...

This is a hi res rendering of the gravity anomaly satellite image (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) that I mapped onto a sphere after adding the missing land (no gravity anomaly data in SIO images) at the poles (MetaCreations's Bryce 4).
Some concentric arcs centered on the Chicxulub crater are clear in the bright lavender tones of the image. At high resolution on the images downloaded from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Geodesy site, there is radial and concentric cracking of the Pacific Plate centered on the impact site. The catastrophe is imaged here, if you know what clues to read.

This plot reflects compiled data for the orbital behavior of 433 Eros.
Click on the image to view at full size.

The aqua lines in polar view and from the "side" (inset box) are the Earth's orbit. The green lines are the orbit of 433 Eros.

The red circle is the orbit of Mars and the lavender orbit is that of Jupiter.

433 Eros would be a nastier hit than the KT extinction event, which destroyed about 70% of the Earth's species.
What is the range of impactors to consider? Earth has been hit by a Mars-sized planet several billion years ago. Theories of moon formation explain that this created the double planet we call the Earth-Moon system. The range of this graph is from a 10 km asteroid (green diamond) to a Mars sized asteroid (red diamond). Note that the volume of material contained in a 300 km crater is not sufficient to produce the amount of ejecta which covers the Earth to about 10 cm. According to the "Goldilocks Principle," an extinction event needs to be nasty enough to wipe out lots of species but fall short of planet busting.
One of the objections to Chicxulub as the crater for the entire KT event is that it is a damaging hit, but does not reflect enough damage. It is possible that the KT event involved multiple hits and/or that the crater is much larger than has been supposed.

When will the next one hit? The answer involves statistics and is uncertain, but here is what some scientists say concerning the record (excerpted from a presentation at "Apocalypse Now?", Geologische Bundeanstalt, 2 Feb. 1995; in press, Abhandlungen der Geologischen Bundeanstalt, Wien, Vol. 53, 51-54, 1996.

Clark R. Chapman
Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado USA
THE RISK TO CIVILIZATION FROM EXTRATERRESTRIAL OBJECTS and Implications of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet Crash

"Development of the physical theory of chaotic dynamics, combined with the exceptional calculating power of modern computers, has led to a much more thorough understanding of the orbits of the asteroids and comets through the history of the solar system. It has been recently realized (P. Michel, P. Farinella & Ch. Froeschle, 1996, Nature 380, 689-691) that the asteroid 433 Eros, target of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission spacecraft launched in early 1996, has approximately a 50% chance of colliding with Earth during the next 100 million years or so. One of the largest of the Earth-approaching asteroids, Eros could produce an explosion more than an order-of-magnitude more powerful than the K/T boundary extinctor. There may be as many as 2000 smaller asteroids already in Earth- crossing orbits that nevertheless are large enough so that an impact by any one of them would cause a global agricultural disaster (although not a mass extinction) and would thereby threaten the lives of most people now living."

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	With still higher resolution imaging, it is possible to reconstruct the original crater rim. LEFT: Click on this image to view at full size. (1.15 MB) The red arrow shows the hi res image of the Chicxulub impact crater itself imposed on a larger, lower resolution image of the Caribbean and Atlantic. There is a groove leading into the crater which shows the direction and the low angle from which the asteroid or comet (rocky core type) hit. The hi res image covers the Yucatán Peninsula. Note the ejection plume pointing north and west out of the crater at the southwestern United States. Blue shades in the image represent less dense material and red shades represent denser materials. Another version of this image with the outline of Yucatán is HERE.
	LEFT: So you don't have to look for the LPI gravitational anomaly image on the previous page, here it is at half size and combined with another map to locate it on the Yucatan Peninsula (click on it to view at full size). The various markings on it indicate testing sites done by a group of scholars. The superimposed black lines are from a map matched to the exact coastline of Yucatán. The crater has some extraordinary features. A trench leads into it, crossed by concentric rings which are in turn crossed by an ejection plume. This gives an order of events, among other things, and hints at a much larger catastrophe than has been supposed. The ejection plume is a big clue to the dynamics that were generated by the 10+ km asteroid...
	This is a hi res rendering of the gravity anomaly satellite image (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) that I mapped onto a sphere after adding the missing land (no gravity anomaly data in SIO images) at the poles (MetaCreations's Bryce 4). Some concentric arcs centered on the Chicxulub crater are clear in the bright lavender tones of the image. At high resolution on the images downloaded from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Geodesy site, there is radial and concentric cracking of the Pacific Plate centered on the impact site. The catastrophe is imaged here, if you know what clues to read.
	This plot reflects compiled data for the orbital behavior of 433 Eros. Click on the image to view at full size.
The aqua lines in polar view and from the "side" (inset box) are the Earth's orbit. The green lines are the orbit of 433 Eros. The red circle is the orbit of Mars and the lavender orbit is that of Jupiter. 433 Eros would be a nastier hit than the KT extinction event, which destroyed about 70% of the Earth's species. What is the range of impactors to consider? Earth has been hit by a Mars-sized planet several billion years ago. Theories of moon formation explain that this created the double planet we call the Earth-Moon system. The range of this graph is from a 10 km asteroid (green diamond) to a Mars sized asteroid (red diamond). Note that the volume of material contained in a 300 km crater is not sufficient to produce the amount of ejecta which covers the Earth to about 10 cm. According to the "Goldilocks Principle," an extinction event needs to be nasty enough to wipe out lots of species but fall short of planet busting. One of the objections to Chicxulub as the crater for the entire KT event is that it is a damaging hit, but does not reflect enough damage. It is possible that the KT event involved multiple hits and/or that the crater is much larger than has been supposed.