Chicxulub crater

The Chicxulub crater (pronunciation: /ˈtʃiːkʃᵿluːb/; Mayan: [tʃʼikʃuluɓ]) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named. It was formed by a large asteroid or comet about 10 kilometres (6 miles) in diameter, the Chicxulub impactor, striking the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), around 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth suddenly became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs. The crater is more than 180 kilometers (110 miles) in diameter and 20 km (12 mi) in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 km depth. It makes the feature the third of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.