66 MILLION YEARS AGO
The Chicxulub asteroid (often searched as "Chicks Club") ended the reign of the dinosaurs and paved the way for humanity.
It wasn't just a rock. It was a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid, approximately 10 to 15 kilometers (6-9 miles) wide. It struck the shallow sea of the Yucatán Peninsula at an angle of 60 degrees, the "deadliest possible angle," unleashing the force of 100 million atomic bombs.
Ejected rock vaporized upon re-entry, turning the atmosphere into a broiler. Temperatures spiked globally, igniting wildfires that burned 70% of Earth's forests instantly.
Billions of tons of sulfur were blasted into the stratosphere. This aerosol cloud reflected sunlight, cooling the Earth by 25°C and halting photosynthesis for years, collapsing the food chain from the bottom up.
The asteroid strikes the shallow waters of the Yucatán. Kinetic energy equivalent to 100 million nuclear bombs is released instantly. The asteroid is vaporized.
A plume of superheated plasma and vaporized rock shoots into space. A transient crater 100km wide and 30km deep opens up in the Earth's crust.
Shockwaves displace the ocean, sending waves up to 100 meters high crashing onto coastlines thousands of miles away, reaching as far as modern-day Chicago.
The dust settles. Ferns recolonize. Small, shrew-like mammals emerge from their burrows into a world free of giants, beginning the evolutionary path to humanity.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event wiped out 75% of all plant and animal species on Earth. It was the end of an era, and the beginning of ours.
Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
The crater is buried beneath kilometers of limestone sediments.
For decades, the "Smoking Gun" of the dinosaur extinction was missing. Geologists searched the world for a crater large enough to explain the event, but found nothing. It wasn't until 1978 that Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo, geophysicists working for the Mexican oil company PEMEX, stumbled upon it.
While conducting an airborne magnetic survey to find petroleum, Penfield noticed a massive, symmetrical arc underwater. Combining this with onshore gravity maps, he realized they formed a perfect 180-kilometer "Bullseye". It wasn't a volcano—it was the impact scar the world had been looking for.
Long before the crater was found, the clue was in the dirt. In 1980, father-and-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of clay found all over the world (the K-Pg boundary).
The layer contained massive amounts of Iridium—a metal rare on Earth but common in asteroids—proving the impact theory.
Grains of quartz were found that had been deformed by immense pressure, only possible from a nuclear blast or asteroid impact.
Tiny glass beads formed from molten rock cooling rapidly in the atmosphere were rained down globally.
Hidden beneath the jungle lies a semi-circular ring of sinkholes known as Cenotes. These freshwater pools, sacred to the Maya, perfectly outline the crater's rim—a ghostly footprint of the impact visible from space.
The impact fractured the limestone bedrock, causing the ground to collapse over millions of years, creating this unique geological formation that pointed scientists to Ground Zero.