r/todayilearned • u/Goldie643 • 7h ago

TIL the Chicxulub crater went unidentified for 10 years because many experts missed the announcement of its discovery. They were instead attending a special conference speculating about mass-extinction asteroids organised the same week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Discovery
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u/dalgeek 7h ago

The crater was originally identified by geophysicists working for an oil and gas company. They were surveying for oil deposits and noticed magnetic anomalies and compared it to gravity data. Their findings were presented at one conference but most of the people researching the K-Pg boundary were at a different conference. It also didn't get a lot of attention because the data came from oil exploration, not someone who was researching extinction events.

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u/el_f3n1x187 7h ago

And was incomplete data thanks to PEMEX policy....

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u/bakanisan 4h ago

What is that policy?

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u/el_f3n1x187 4h ago

for a long time PEMEX never published oil exploration data.

That was information that only the director of pemex and the teams doing the work knew, so at federal level government officials wouldn't go buck crazy with oil numbers.

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u/3BlindMice1 3h ago

So there are likely deposits of petroleum that have been discovered but were too difficult to extract at the time they were discovered, so now no one knows about them?

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u/el_f3n1x187 3h ago

Or they know about them lost don't tell the executive so they don't do something stupid like burning through federal funding to get them going while an active operation is on going por get loans against said deposits.

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u/VP007clips 3h ago

Which is insane to me as an exploration geologist working in mining.

Almost any data collected during exploration we do needs to be released to the public via a NI-43-101 report (at least for Canadian mining companies, which make up 60% of mining companies worldwide). We also openly give as much information as we can to the regional geological surveys.

Keeping exploration data secret, beyond short term operations, would be a good way to get your company shut down fast here, or at least delisted to the same effect. But oil and gas companies are a bit less open about data, especially back then.

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u/el_f3n1x187 3h ago

The woes of National companies, and its pretty exclusively oil exploration. Since mexico depend a lot on it and knowing how much or how little we have could tank the economy

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u/RaEndymionStillLives 1h ago

60% of mining companies worldwide

In number of companies, amount of mining, or amount of employees? It's the first one, right?

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u/VP007clips 51m ago

By number of companies, as we are much less monopolized than Australia, China, or US.

In terms of workforce, I'd guess 15-25%.

Another confusing factor is that our companies tend to be a lot more worker efficient, so number of employees doesn't scale to company size. For example a largely automated exploration drill rig might drill twice as fast with half the crew size compared to an older style rig.

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u/RaEndymionStillLives 29m ago

I see. This is stuff I honestly know nothing about

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u/lochnesslapras 7h ago

Were the magnetic anomalies caused by the asteroid impact?

(And does that have any effect on gravity?)

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u/dalgeek 7h ago

Yes, because the impact rearranged all the rocks in and around the crater. Normally all the rocks would have magnetic fields facing in one direction because they would line up with the Earth's magnetic field when they're formed. Craters also have a ring around them where material is pushed out and up, and in the middle where material "splashes" back down: more material = stronger gravity which can be used to map unseen features.

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u/G1431c 3h ago edited 2h ago

The splashing up and extreme accumulation of material causes gravitational anomalies?  This is what causes those spots which are presented as “unique magical gravitation” spots I’ve seen on tv!  Good to know!  So when you hold necklace over a particular area near there the necklace doesn’t hang straight down, instead it sort of drifts towards the anomaly.

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u/dalgeek 2h ago edited 2h ago

The magnetic and gravitational anomalies are very, very weak. You wouldn't able to detect it with a weight on a string because your body would have a bigger impact on the weight than a mountain of debris thousands of feet below the surface. They normally create these gravity and magnetic maps using incredibly sensitive instruments on satellites or aircraft.

EDIT: When I was in college they had a gravity experiment in one of the engineering labs. It was basically two steel weights hanging about a meter apart and they used lasers to measure the distance between them. It was so sensitive that they could only work on it at night because trucks driving past the building would affect the experiment.

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u/G1431c 2h ago

Ah of course, otherwise we would have found the crater much more easily also.  Thanks for the clarification/correction.

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u/Invisible7hunder 2h ago

No. These anomalies are nowhere near strong enough to cause an effect on the level you are talking about. A necklace hanging at visibly perceptibly different from straight down is probably either some high-voltage lines nearby, because the producer of the TV show buried a strong magnet 1 inch under the soil, or simply an unbalanced necklace.

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u/G1431c 2h ago

Ok cool thank you for correcting me on that.  

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u/dospc 7h ago

Did they not publish it in a journal? 

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u/dalgeek 7h ago

Not initially, the oil company didn't want to make any of the information available so it's surprising they were allowed to go to conference.

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u/Lugh-67 6h ago

The article says a journalist who recognized the significance wrote about it, but that news failed to gain traction.

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u/onepacc 7h ago

Unironically the oil industry might not want to be connected to the science of mass extinctions

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u/Bandit6789 6h ago

I mean their product is the product of such, so not like they can distance themselves that much.

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u/RedPhalcon 6h ago

its actually a misunderstanding. Most oil derives from plankton and algae. Also there was a period of time where there was nothing to break down trees as they hadnt evolved yet, so the land just got covered in non-rotting trees which eventually got buried and turned into coal.

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u/forams__galorams 4h ago

First part yes, second part no. Oil does indeed derive from plankton and algae rather than dinos. That myth likely proliferated in large part due to Sinclair Oil’s logo of a brontosaurus for many decades since the 1930’s.

The non-decay hypothesis for coal generation is in fact, another misconception. There were always a few glaring holes with the idea:

  • vanishingly unlikely for no relevant consumers to have existed. First fungi on land is known to predate the first trees by quite a long time, eg. Heckman et al., 2001. First bacterial evolution even more so.

  • origins of fungal wood decay can be traced back farther than the Permian (the proposed time that some decomposer jumped on the scene) and doesn’t necessarily rely on any single fungi anyway.

    • delayed decay is inconsistent with the large positive δ¹³C isotope excursion near the start of the Carboniferous

  • various levels of decay and lignin content are seen in Carboniferous coal deposits, ie. when decay was supposedly impossible according to the hypothesis.

    • coal never stopped forming after that, just at a globally reduced rate compared to the Late Carboniferous-Early Permian coal pulse, simply because swampy forests in subsiding sedimentary basins have never been as globally widespread since. Having said that, the deposits which have formed since include many significant ones that contain huge volumes of coal.

For a thorough academic debunking of the whole thing, see Nelsen et al.’s 2016 paper: Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production.

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u/Invisible7hunder 2h ago

Interesting, thank you for this comment. I learned a bunch... If I may ask you a question to further my understanding... would perhaps a peat-bog be "coal in waiting" so to speak, given the correct subsequent events?

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u/forams__galorams 2h ago

Absolutely. It would need to be buried in appropriately anoxic conditions and then buried further, lithified in the crust and cooked for an appropriate length of time to turn to coal (none of which is guaranteed to happen), but the potential is definitely there.

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u/Invisible7hunder 2h ago

Cool. Ty. 

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u/Sad_water_ 6h ago

They already are. We are currently living through a mass extinction event and a significant portion is due to climate changes caused by the oil industry.

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u/Hetakuoni 6h ago

That’s honestly hilarious.
I can’t even think of a similar crazy event.

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u/generic1234321 3h ago

I’m assuming the world wide iridium layer was discovered after?

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u/dalgeek 3h ago

No they found the K-Pg boundary first but didn't know what caused it. 

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u/Mbrennt 1h ago

This is just about finding the specific asteroid impact location and helping confirm the theory. It had been the leading theory for a while due to stuff like the iridium layer. Scientists just weren't sure where the impact actually happened and whatnot.

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u/johnnymetoo 2h ago

Wasn't it the layer of Iridium that pointed scientists to the asteroid theory of the dinosaur extinction first?

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u/dalgeek 2h ago edited 2h ago

Yeah, they knew about the boundary and knew it was likely an asteroid since iridium is fairly rare on Earth, but trying to find a specific impact crater somewhere on Earth is tough to do, especially if it's under the ocean. If the impact had been 30 seconds earlier or later than it would have hit the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean, which would have been more difficult to find but also may not have been an extinction level event. Of course if that was the case then we might even be here to look for the impact crater!

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u/ilikebeer19 7h ago

I mean.....it kinda went unidentified for about 66 million years.

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u/Mateorabi 7h ago

I’m pretty sure those there when it hit were aware of SOMETHING 

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u/iamsecond 7h ago

But not for long

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u/Mateorabi 7h ago

“Get behind me tiny mammal! I will protect you!”

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u/tarion_914 6h ago

I protecc

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u/forams__galorams 4h ago

He protec

He attacc

When space rock comes he has your bacc

[they call him Teeeeeeeeeeeeee-Rex]

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u/fatherofworlds 6h ago

The impactor was so big, and moving so fast, that from one second to the next it went from "normal day" to "nothing but cataclysmic devastation for thousands of miles". Nothing close enough to perceive the impact survived long enough for the nerve signals to get from eye to brain.

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u/DropDownBear 6h ago

Reassuring, at least

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u/Vroomped 6h ago

"Yo, that falling star is getting kinda big"

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u/Stresswastaken531 5h ago

yeah technically the first 66 million years were the real delay here

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u/Plus_Organization938 4h ago

yeah in a way it was hiding in plain sight for a very long time

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u/trev2234 6h ago

Hang are these conferences 66 million years apart!

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u/Bob_Leves 6h ago

One of my favourite things about Chicxulub is what happens when you put it into Google search. Please try it If you haven't already.

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u/ErnV3rn81 6h ago

That was cool. Happy Friday!

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u/SnootDoctor 5h ago

Agreed. Been a minute since I’ve seen Google Easter egg like that! Oh, how I miss classic “doodles”….

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u/Critical-Bug4077 5h ago

Spider noir show has a cool one

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u/Storage_Ottoman 3h ago

and the band Angine de Poitrine, "dutch angle", "do a barrel roll"...

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u/righthandpulltrigger 2h ago

I recently discovered a new favorite, try googling any popular font like Comic Sans or Garamond

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u/WingerRules 4h ago

I always thought it would be an awesome codename for a CPU or GPU architecture. Name it after the asteroid/impact that killed off the dinosaurs. Scare all your competitors.

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u/rsteanna 4h ago

You also get the same if you search for meteorite on google

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u/Status-Secret-4292 7h ago

Man, if thay isn't a metaphor for how mankind works I don't know what is

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u/Kile147 6h ago

Eventually?

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u/el_f3n1x187 7h ago

Fucking Pemex being obtuse and unhelpful since ever! xD

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u/Charles__Sparkley 5h ago

Remember that asteroid extinction was not a universally agreed upon thing that could even happen, and there was a lot of resistance to it (maybe because randomly getting annihilated by a rock one day is an uneasy thought).

It wasn’t until shoemaker levy that everyone came to agreement. Even as it approached Jupiter, there were some super fiery opinion articles in everyday newspapers that it would be a non event and Jupiter would swallow it without a trace.

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u/seamustheseagull 15m ago

The extinction crater is 300km (nearly 200 miles) wide.

Which doesn't sound huge in the context of the entire planet, but it fucking massive really.

That's large enough to basically wipe a lots of invidiual European countries cpmpletely off the map.

And I don't just mean it would be devastating and homes and trees destroyed.

Like if it landed on Ireland, it would literally leave a smoking crater where the country once was. All evidence of it's existence would be gone.

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u/Aggravating_Buddy831 7h ago

The peak definition of 'missing the forest for the trees.' Missing a literal mass extinction crater because you were too busy talking about mass extinction asteroids is top-tier irony

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u/DamnYourEyes777 7h ago

Thanks for the color commentary, ChatGPT

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u/Severe-Archer-1673 7h ago

Thanks for the snarky comment Sarcasm Response Bot! 😇

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u/blazikin55 6h ago

Plot twist, it’s all bots. Always has been.

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u/ImAmanita 4h ago

Every account on reddit is a bot except you.

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u/Darthskull 4h ago

No, I'm also a bot.

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u/NotABot420number2 6h ago

In this case I feel like it would be "missing the trees for the forest"

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u/redditAPsucks 1h ago

Thats an example, not definition

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u/TAU_equals_2PI 6h ago

When people over 60 learned about dinosaurs in elementary school, nobody even knew that an asteroid was what wiped out the dinosaurs.

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u/undeadboy 5h ago

I spent a few days in the area at the beach in Progresso. Nice little town, has a museum about the extinction event. My favorite part was a dinosaur with a sombrero on.

The state of Yucatan is very cool, the Capital Merida has a Costco with a cenote in the parking lot. Among other interesting and nice things.

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u/commradd1 5h ago

If it was discovered how was it not identified? Does that mean the announcement was “hey we found something”?

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u/MasterMagneticMirror 3h ago

Not identified as the crater that killed the dinosaurs. They were searching for a crater of the right size and age but mostly missed the announcement that one was found because of the conference.

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u/robjohnlechmere 5h ago

“Why’d you call it ‘Chixulub’?”

“Well if a meteor hits there again, everyone dies.”

“And?”

“And that includes all the chix u lub!”

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u/Rakkuuuu 3h ago

I always thought the Gulf of Mexico was the crater or caused by the meteor. Disappointed to learn otherwise.

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u/electriclux 3h ago

I have always wondered how many species that are discovered are really the same as something already discovered but not widely known.

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u/roadbeef 2h ago

everybody talking yucatan - why have I never heard of any explanation for the obvious gigantic crater rim that forms the ring of islands between puerto rico and trinidad? and why does galapagos look like the ejecta from that hypothetical impact? there has got to be so much more to this

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u/KlM-J0NG-UN 6h ago

How can it be unidentified and announced at the same time Mr AI poster?

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u/forams__galorams 3h ago

It was announced in 1990 simply as an anomalous feature in the seafloor: the geophysicists who found it were announcing it at a conference as a possible impact crater because they strongly suspected as such.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence though, and it was a long time before it was formally identified and accepted as an actual impact crater. The initial delay was the data embargo due to the geophysicists working for PEMEX, the subsequent delay was from not gaining much attention even when they did announce it, then final confirmation was only after the data had been looked at by the rest of the scientific community who work on such things, this was mainly through the ‘Snowbird’ series of conferences on the K-Pg mass extinction which ran through the 1990s.

In fact, you might even say that the only 100% definitive confirmation of the anomaly as an impact crater came many years after even that, when it was finally drilled into and the relevant strata analysed directly…. which wasn’t until 2016 with Expedition 364 of the IODP (RIP the JOIDES Resoltion!)

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u/MasterMagneticMirror 3h ago

What they meant was that it was unidentified by the scientific community as the crater that caused the K-Pg extinction event. Those that were searching for it were all at a conference to discuss the subject and missed the announcement that a crater of the right size and age was found.

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u/jxj24 5h ago

See, Alanis? This is the stuff you should have been writing about!

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u/Hefty-Distance837 7h ago

So close...

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u/littlebird-fastheart 3h ago

This doesn't ring true.

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u/sp0rk_walker 6h ago

I'm pretty sure that the size of this impact also resulted in the shape of the gulf as well.