In fact, the first person to connect the Yucatan ring with the Alvarez asteroid theory was a Texan journalist named Carlos Byars who wrote an article for the Houston Chronicle in 1981 asking if the two were linked. But that evidence belonged to Pemex, so was not made available to the scientific community. Using a magnetometer, he scanned the waters looking for signs of oil, instead finding the underwater half of the huge crater. Shoemaker – the pioneering American geologist who is credited as one of the founders of the field of planetary science and remains, 21 years after his death, the only person whose ashes are buried on the Moon – had instructed her that near perfect circles were unlikely to have been caused by other terrestrial forces, and could provide clues to Earth’s geological development.įor example, as early as 1978, geophysicist Glen Penfield, working alongside Antonio Camargo-Zanoguera for Mexico’s national oil company Pemex, had flown out over the Caribbean waters that lap the shore at Chicxulub Puerto. The key to her ‘Aha! moment’ had been an intuition she’d picked up after working with a legendary figure in space science, Eugene Shoemaker. Ocampo's discovery came at the end of a decade-long quest for the location of the asteroid impact. “It gave us a leg up to be able to compete, to be able to flourish, as we eventually did,” she said. Without that impact, humanity might well have never existed. The asteroid, although bringing unimaginable violence to this area, benefitted one species above all others: humans, who, millions of years later, would evolve into the ecological gap created by the destruction of the world's biggest predators. And by boosting local awareness of the cataclysmic events that took place here, the museum hopes to begin the process of bringing tourists to explore the Yucatan’s prehistoric past, which overlaps with popular Mayan historical destinations like Chichen Itza and the party city of Cancun.Ĭhicxulub Puerto and its surrounds deserve to be better known worldwide, says Ocampo, who was born in Colombia but moved as a child to Argentina, arriving in the US at age 15. The Museum of Science of the Chicxulub Crater, a joint project by the Mexican Government and the country's biggest university, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), aims to take people back to the moment, 66 million years ago, when the 12km asteroid changed world history, ending the reign of the giant beasts that had lasted millions of years. Today, there is a museum, opened in September 2018 between Chicxulub Puerto and the Yucatan capital Merida, 45km to the south). Until Ocampo's findings were published in 1991, this area of the Yucatan had been the subject of little international interest. The only monument, in front of the church on the main square, takes the form of a cartoonish bone, made from concrete, laid in front of an altar like plinth depicting dinosaur species. There is a playground nearby where climbing frames and slides are topped with hard plastic sauropods in primary colours. Stroll around the main square and you'll catch sight of paintings of dinosaurs by local children. Today, that centre point, the place where that imaginary compass stuck and the mountain once rose, is a buried a kilometre below a tiny town called Chicxulub Puerto.Įven if they reach the correct town, located 7km east along white-sand coastline from the popular holiday resort of Progreso, there are few indications that this was the scene of one of the most consequential and disastrous acts of the last 100 million years of Earth's history. In the years that followed the cataclysmic impact, the world would have changed beyond recognition, with the plume of ash blocking the sky and creating perpetual night-time for more than a year, plunging temperatures below freezing, and killing off about 75% of all life on Earth – including almost all the dinosaurs. They now believe the impact instantly created a crater 30km deep, causing the Earth to act like a pond after a pebble is dropped, rebounding up in the centre to create a mountain – just for a moment – reaching twice the height of Mt Everest, before crashing down. Since the early ‘90s, teams of scientists from the Americas, Europe and Asia have worked to fill in the remaining blanks. Ocampo's chance encounter was the beginning of a scientific correspondence that would establish the foundations for what most scientists believe today: that this ring corresponds to the edge of the crater caused by an asteroid 12km wide, which struck the Yucatan and exploded with unimaginable force that turned rock to liquid.
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