A Steaming Cauldron Follows the Dinosaurs’ Demise

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 https://newsroom.usra.edu/a-steaming-cauldron-follows-the-dinosaurs-demise/

Source:  By Suraiya Farukhi, Ph.D, Universities Space Research Association. 

Excerpt: Houston, TX and Columbia, MD. A new study reveals the Chicxulub impact crater may have harbored a vast and long-lived hydrothermal system after the catastrophic impact event linked to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The Chicxulub impact crater, roughly 180 kilometers in diameter, is the best preserved large impact structure on Earth and a target for exploration of several impact-related phenomena. In 2016, a research team supported by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program drilled into the crater, reaching a depth of 1,335 meters (> 1 kilometer) below the modern-day sea floor. The team recovered rock core samples which can be used to study the thermal and chemical modification of Earth’s crust caused by the impact. The core samples show the crater hosted an extensive hydrothermal system that chemically and mineralogically modified more than 100,000 cubic kilometers of Earth’s crust. 

The lead author, Universities Space Research Association’s David Kring at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), explains,“Imagine an undersea Yellowstone Caldera, but one that is several times larger and produced by the staggering impact event that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.” The team found evidence that subsurface rivers of water were heated and driven upwards towards the boundary between the floor of the impact crater and the bottom of the Yucatán sea. The hot water streamed around the edges of an approximate 3-kilometer thick pool of impact-generated magma, percolated through fractured rock, and rose to the seafloor where it vented into the sea. The hot water system was particularly intense in an uplifted range of mountains on the seafloor that form a 90 kilometer-diameter ring around the center of the crater. The rock core recovered from that peak ring is cross-cut by fossil hydrothermal conduits that are lined with multi-colored minerals, some, appropriately enough, a fiery red-orange color. Nearly two dozen minerals precipitated from the fluids as they coursed through the rock, replacing the rock’s original minerals....

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