Eli5: How have we not found the 10km wide asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs? Shouldn’t we have at least found a crater?
In: Earth Science
We have — it’s in Mexico. The crater is about 150 km wide. The asteroid itself was vaporized on impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
We have.
The asteroid impact led to the extinction of 75% of life, including all non-avian dinosaurs. The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatán Peninsula. … It is called Chicxulub after a nearby town.
We did. It’s called the Gulf of Mexico, these days. That’s where it hit. The asteroid blasted apart, either just prior to or when it hit, so there are pieces of it all over the area, but most are underwater or underground.
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It’s strange that you’re interested enough to post this but you’ve never googled [“meteor that killed the dinosaurs”](https://i.imgur.com/m30lAO9.png). Shouldn’t you at least be asking “ELI5: *have* we found the crater?” Like, how did you conclude that we *haven’t* found the crater, *without* googling that?
Without even having to click on any of the search results, you get this right at the top:
>Chicxulub
>
>The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatán Peninsula. It is called Chicxulub after a nearby town. Part of the crater is offshore and part of it is on land. The crater is buried beneath many layers of rock and sediment.
We are virtually certain where the crater is and that an asteroid was responsible; in the layer where the mass extinction of dinosaurs happens there is also a layer of Iridium a very rare element on Earth but one that is present in asteroids so it is likely that the source of the Iridium is an asteroid which hit at around the same time the dinosaurs died. https://youtu.be/kVg-QZCzqg0
The asteroid was totally vaporized by the energy of the collision. It left a thin layer of iridium deposits across the entire planet which can be seen in the fossil record. We found the impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico just north of the Yucatan peninsula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_boundary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
We have. It’s called the Chicxulub Crater in the yukitan peninsula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Why does it not LOOK like what you’re used to thinking about with a crater on the moon or something similiar? It’s had about 66 million years of erosion, etc to reshape it.
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