A long-lived impact-generated hydrothermal system at the Chicxulub impact structure
Annemarie E Pickersgill, Evangelos Christou, Marissa M Tremblay, Dan N Barfod, Cornelia Rasmussen, Martin R Lee, Martin Schmieder, Gareth S Collins, Ross Dymock, Sean P S Gulick, David A Kring, Joanna V Morgan, Gordon R Osinski, Timothy Swindle, Sonia M Tikoo, Axel Wittmann, the Expedition 364 Scien · 2026
Read A long-lived impact-generated hydrothermal system at the Chicxulub impact structure by Annemarie E Pickersgill, Evangelos Christou, Marissa M Tremblay, Dan N Barfod, Cornelia Rasmussen, Martin R Lee, Martin Schmieder, Gareth S Collins, Ross Dymock, Sean P S Gulick, David A Kring, Joanna V Morgan, Gordon R Osinski, Timothy Swindle, Sonia M Tikoo, Axel Wittmann, the Expedition 364 Scien (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13249567.txt.
Description
Pickersgill and a large drilling expedition team dated the hot water system inside the Chicxulub crater, in a 2026 study. The crater, in present-day Mexico, was blasted out sixty-six million years ago by the asteroid linked to the dinosaur extinction. Heated water circulated through its fractured rock long afterward, the kind of setting where life may first have arisen.
Rock dating and computer simulation together show the hydrothermal activity lasted at least eight million years. That is roughly four times longer than earlier estimates from rock magnetism and mineral studies. The authors call Chicxulub the longest-lived impact-driven hydrothermal system yet documented on Earth, with implications for how life might start on other worlds.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Annemarie E Pickersgill, Evangelos Christou, Marissa M Tremblay, Dan N Barfod, Cornelia Rasmussen, Martin R Lee, Martin Schmieder, Gareth S Collins, Ross Dymock, Sean P S Gulick, David A Kring, Joanna V Morgan, Gordon R Osinski, Timothy Swindle, Sonia M Tikoo, Axel Wittmann, the Expedition 364 Scien |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 53 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |