Scientists have long known that a giant meteor struck the earth 65 million years ago, but up until recently, they've never been able to see its crater. That's because it's thousands of meters deep in the sea off the coast of Mexico, buried by debris and almost a kilometer of marine sediments.
But according to the statement issued today by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), an international team of researchers led by MBARI's Charlie Paull have finally created the first detailed map of the crater—which measures over 100 miles across—by using multi-beam sonars.
MBARI researchers will be at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this week to present evidence that remnants from the meteor's impact are exposed along a feature called the Campeche Escarpment—a towering underwater cliff in the southern Gulf of Mexico.
According to the statement, the Campeche Escarpment is nearly 400 miles long, over 4000 meters tall, and "is comparable to one wall of the Grand Canyon."
And due to the advances of modern robotics, it is now something of a researcher's dream:
Just as a geologist can walk the Grand Canyon, mapping layers of rock and collecting rock samples, Paull hopes to one day perform geologic “fieldwork” and collect samples along the Campeche Escarpment. Only a couple of decades ago, the idea of performing large-scale geological surveys thousands of meters below the ocean surface would have seemed a distant fantasy. Over the last eight years, however, such mapping has become almost routine for MBARI geologists using underwater robots.
Scientists hope that further analysis of the area will uncover clues about what happened during the devastating extinction event that occurred 65 million years ago; additional studies are already in the works.