* Astronomy

This image of the Yucatan Peninsula was acquired by the Terra satellite on April 11, 2007.
The Yucatan Peninsula, part of Mexico, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico.


Expand (337kb, 1024 x 768)....................Expand (340kb, 1024 x 768)
Credit: Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS team/NASA

About 65 million years ago, a massive disruption led to worldwide extinction of dinosaurs. The impact of a giant asteroid created massive tsunamis and spewed forth a global cloud of carbon gases that altered Earth’s atmosphere and blocked the light for weeks, possibly years. In recent years, that impact event has been linked to a 112-mile-wide crater, dubbed Chicxulub, on the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Since its discovery in the 1980s, the Chicxulub crater has left its own impact on sky-watchers and sci-fi fans worldwide, and impact events have been depicted in Hollywood films such as “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact,” as well as countless artistic renditions.
Despite the spotlight on the theories surrounding the impact, Michael Whalen, associate professor of geology at University of Alaska Fairbanks, has managed to stay “out of the limelight, yet into the limestone” with his work sampling the core of the crater. Due to the efforts of Buck Sharpton, UAF vice chancellor for research, Whalen became part of an international effort to correlate seismic data with information obtained from a drill hole that reaches more than 1.2 miles deep, through the impact layer and beyond.
Interestingly enough, unlike other more noticeable craters, the Chicxulub crater spent 55 million years in virtual obscurity, due to the fast infilling that masked its presence. Speedy recovery, which by geologists’ standards amounts to about 10 million years, preserved the crater by mantling it with sediment, attracting geologists like Whalen, who studies the effects of extinction events on carbonate layers, also known as limestone, and the organisms that make up those layers.
On Jan. 20, Whalen will be travelling with a team to the Chicxulub site for a week to obtain more core samples in order to get a better understanding of how the crater filled in and how the earth itself recovered from the massive impact. He’s also part of an ongoing collaboration that is trying to secure funding to drill two more holes in the crater, one offshore and one through the peak ring.

Source

There's growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a palaeontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years

Read more

China has begun to drill the first well as part of scientific research on climate change that occurred during the Cretaceous period, in Daqing city of Heilongjiang province in northeast China.

Professor Wang Chengshan from China's University of Geosciences, the lead scientist in the project, said that the research will be aimed at probing climate change during a period from 65 million to 140 million years ago.
Meanwhile, he said the drilling would also help to probe the oil reserve for the sustainable development of the Daqing oil field.