[Rockhounds] Dino-Killing Asteroid Spawned a Huge Magma Chamber That Lasted Millions of Years

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

When the dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit Earth some 66 million years ago, it
produced a subterranean pool of magma roughly nine times larger than the
current caldera at Yellowstone National Park, according to new research.

The Chicxulub impact event of the Late Cretaceous extinguished 75 percent
of life on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, but it also generated
an enormous and long-lasting hydrothermal system filled with magma,
according to new research
<https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/22/eaaz3053> published today in
Science Advances. Evidence for this was spotted in core samples taken from
Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the site of the ancient impact.

The kinetic energy produced by the impact was around 100 million megatons,
which is roughly equal to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs. This was enough
energy to melt a significant portion of the Earth’s crust, resulting in the
magma chamber. This “central melt pool,” as the researchers call it, lasted
for hundreds of thousands of years and possibly for more than 2 million
years before it finally cooled, according to the paper.

At its peak, the massive Chicxulub hydrothermal system was roughly 3
kilometers thick, encompassing 140,000 cubic kilometers of Earth’s crust
(33,590 cubic miles). That’s more than nine times the size of Yellowstone
National Park’s hydrothermal system.

https://gizmodo.com/dino-killing-asteroid-spawned-a-huge-magma-chamber-that-1843752492