The crater becomes a hydrothermal system
The impact leaves a hot, chemically rich plumbing network that feeds microbes for a million years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1 million years
- Known to
- ± 500 thousand years
- Era
- Paleocene, Cenozoic
The energy dumped into the crust by the impact leaves the shattered rock beneath the crater hot enough to drive circulating hydrothermal fluids across a volume of tens of thousands of cubic kilometres, a system that runs for perhaps a hundred thousand to a million years. Mineral veins in the drill core record it. The same argument is made in reverse for the origin of life: large impacts on the early Earth would have created exactly this kind of long-lived warm, mineral-rich, chemically disequilibrated habitat.