Chicxulub Facts

Currently there are still more unanswered questions regarding the Chicxulub impact than facts.

Since we do not know much exact information about it, and most of the findings are recent, we can only speculate about how the events of that era unfold.

Thus, it is hard to discern the facts from the suppositions, but in this page, we will try to summarize the facts we know:

The crater is over 180 km (110 miles) in diameter;

Its central point is located next to the village of Chicxulub in Yucatan, hence its name;

Its impact date coincide with that of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, 66 million years ago;

The impact was the main contributing factor to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.

The estimated diameter of the impactor (comet or asteroid) was about 10 km;

The energy that the impact produced is estimated at the equivalent of around 100 million megatons of TNT;

The impact is the largest that was discovered on Earth’s surface;

Because of the cloud that formed after the impact, a considerable proportion of Sun’s rays were blocked, thus the planet cooled down for a number of years following the impact;

Chicxulub Impact - artist impression