An article published in the journal “Science” describes a study that found a possible connection between asteroid impacts and the production of habitats for new life forms. A team of researchers carried out a series of drills in the underground circular structure of Chicxulub, the large crater beneath the Yucatan peninsula generated by an impact. That event, which started the extinction of dinosaurs and many other life forms about 66 million years ago.

This research about the Chicxulub crater is one of many that in recent decades are trying to reconstruct the events that led to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. The idea that the impact of an asteroid was its cause was proposed in the late ’70s by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist. In subsequent years, geological research in the area around the Yucatan peninsula led to the discovery of the crater called Chicxulub, after a village near its center.

The asteroid that produced the Chicxulub crater is estimated to have had a diameter of at least 10 kilometers (6 miles). A ring with a diameter of 180 kilometer (110 miles) was for a time considered to be the border of the crater but more recent evidence indicates that in reality Chicxulub has a diameter around 300 kilometers (190 miles). The impact generated an energy more than a billion times greater than that of the atomics dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and could have caused a strong volcanic activity that contributed to the great extinction.

This research on the Chicxulub crater was conducted between April and May 2016 with a series of drills between 506 and 1,335 meters below sea level. Sampling were carried out from the rocky inner ridges of the crater, called in technical jargon peak ring.

The analyzes of the samples provided some surprising results because they suggest that the impact changed the structure of the rocks making them more porous and less dense than predicted by the models. This is important because porous rocks can be niches for the development of simple organisms, also because the circulation of water heated within the Earth’s crust would deliver nutrients.

This type of situation was particularly significant at the beginning of Earth’s history. At the time, asteroid impacts were common and it’s plausible that they created rocks with similar properties. In substance, at least one asteroid looks like the culprit of a great extinction but others that hit the Earth a few billion years ago may have contributed to the development of primitive life forms on the planet.

This research also reconstructed the events that followed that impact. The asteroid struck the Earth with so much force as to push the rocks even deeper of than about ten kilometers below the surface where they were at the time and then outward. The rocks were then moved toward the inside of the crater and upwards towards the surface before collapsing again downwards and outwards to form the peak ring. In total, these rocks moved approximately 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles) in a matter of minutes.

The research is just beginning. More in-depth analyzes of the samples taken in the Chicxulub crater will be conducted to improve the existing models and allow to make new, more accurate, computer simulations. At this point the research has several purposes: to reconstruct the consequences of the impact with a possible tsunami, the traces of the rebirth of life after the extinction but also the possible role of that kind of impacts in the early development of life on Earth.