Success For Dinosaur Crater Drill

A UK/US-led team’s effort to drill into the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Mexico has been declared an outstanding success.

13:04 26 May 2016

A UK/US led team has successfully obtained rocks nearly 1,300m below the gulf of seafloor following seven weeks of digging into the deep bowl cut out of the Earth surface caused by an asteroid 66 million years ago.  

 

The gathered samples are expected to provide new information on the scale of the impact and environmental effects.

The operations manager on the project, Dave Smith, said: "The core recovery, we're all really chuffed about - the almost 100% core recovery and the quality of the cores we've been getting up.

"It's been a remarkable success. We've got deeper than I thought we might do.”

 

Imperial College London's Prof Joanna Morgan described the discovery “quite magical.”

 

She said: "Before I came out here, I remember getting quite nervous, quite anxious - what would happen? Would we be successful? But since I've been on the Myrtle, I've been quite calm because things have been happening, and we've been getting lovely cores."

 

She added: "Ultimately, the cores go to a facility in Texas where anybody can then sample them. Everything is archived. If someone has a new geochemistry measurement, they can go look at the core for a long, long time into the future,"