Posted on 03/06/2016 8:35:56 PM PST by Utilizer
This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180-kilometer-wide crater rim, scientists hope to settle ideas about how such “peak rings,” hallmarks of the largest impact craters, take shape.
“Chicxulub is the only preserved structure with an intact peak ring that we can get to,” says University of Texas, Austin, geophysicist Sean Gulick, co–chief scientist for the $10 million project, sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. “All the other ones are either on another planet, or they’ve been eroded.”
At the end of March, a specially equipped vessel will sail from the Mexican port of Progreso to a point 30 kilometers offshore. There, in water 17 meters deep, the boat will sink three pylons and raise itself above the waves, creating a stable platform. By 1 April, the team plans to start drilling, quickly churning through 500 meters of limestone that were deposited on the sea floor since the impact. After that, the drillers will extract core samples, in 3-meter-long increments, as they go deeper. For 2 months, they will work day and night in an attempt to go down another kilometer, looking for changes in rock types, cataloging microfossils, and collecting DNA samples (see figure, below).
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
Note: "...asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs..." is still classified as speculation, as there is more than one simple theory that attempts to explain this event and many questions still present themselves when one looks into the facts surrounding their extinction(s).
Ping!
Reptilicus ping
T-Rex and the Crater of Doom ping...
What could go wrong?
They may be concerned about jamming the barrel or grinding up samples, though.
(lots of trip time for those hands...
They will come back with core samples of he alien starship that crashed.
Oh, and for those of you who are not experts in the field (such as moi) or who do not deal with the name on a daily basis, I have found that the best way to memorize the pronunciation of “Chicxulub” is “Chicks-Who-Lube”.
*grin*
The K/T Event, I leave up to your imagination... *snicker*
I’m anxious to see what they find. With a thick limestone cap, the stressed rock beneath should be well preserved.
What if they awaken a zillasaur?
“By 1 April, the team plans to start drilling...”
I think I would wait a day to start drilling into something left over from an extinction event. I’d skip Friday the 13th too!
“Drill, baby. Drill.”
I’m guessing they are looking for a lot more detail with the 3 meter cores - changes in life forms, etc. At least it isn’t the 2 FOOT cores they use on shallow environmental jobs!
I worked on an oil rig back in college. One time we spent all day coming out of a hole. Went to bed dead-tired, but knowing that when we got up the other crew would finish and we would have an easy day.
Woke up and looked out the window to a rig with a lot of pipe still on the stack! The other driller lost count and slammed the drill bit into the bottom of the well. We had to continue tripping out of the hole to replace the broken bit! Aaaaggggghhh!
Inbred muslims call for support of even more deeply inbred muslims.
its a muslim devolution.
My humble apologies.
Wrong thread.
In before the Far Side cartoon.
Your answer actually does remind me of a Far Side cartoon. The newspapers got captions switched of a Far Side cartoon and a Dennis the Menace cartoon.
The fortune teller in the Far Side cartoon told the caveman, “Not peanut butter sandwiches again!” and Dennis told his mother at the lunch table, “I see your preserved skull resting on a shelf somewhere.”
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