Life returns to the crater within years
Drilling into Chicxulub finds a thriving ecosystem in the impact basin almost immediately after the blast.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 30 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Paleocene, Cenozoic
In 2016 an offshore expedition drilled the Chicxulub peak ring and recovered the sediments that settled onto the crater floor. The result was a surprise: burrows, plankton and a functioning marine community appear within a few years of the impact, and a productive ecosystem is established within about 30,000 years — faster than at many sites far from ground zero. Recovery, it turns out, depended less on distance from the impact than on local conditions and on which survivors happened to arrive first.