Life after the asteroid apocalypse

Abstract

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wiped out a huge swath of life on planet Earth. Could similar impacts have helped kick-start life itself? “Wow, she’s really high above the water,” Sean Gulick thought as his ship chugged toward a drilling platform some 30 kilometers off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Perched on three sturdy pylons resting on the seafloor, the innovative platform—a “liftboat” known as Myrtle —towered 17 meters above the ocean’s surface. The Chicxulub crater, shown here in an artist’s conception, formed a little more than 66 million years ago when a meteorite plowed into Earth’s surface, wiping out 75% of all species on the planet. But recent findings suggest the impact actually could have helped generate the conditions necessary for the creation of life itself. Image courtesy of Detlev van Ravenswaay/ScienceSource. Researchers needed to keep Myrtle well clear of the waves to steady the drilling equipment that extended from the platform. Their efforts worked: After boring more than 1,300 meters into the seafloor, Myrtle’s crew collected hundreds of intact cores of rock from beneath the surface of the 190-kilometer-wide Chicxulub crater. “I have been on over 25 scientific cruises,” Gulick, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), wrote on the mission blog during drilling operations in April 2016. “But never on one with as much potential for discovering something truly new.” What the researchers found were indications that living organisms bounced back in the face of extraordinary devastation—in the process, they may have uncovered a clue or two about life’s very beginnings. Even if most people don’t recognize its name, the Chicxulub crater is probably the most famous impact scar on the surface of our planet. The crater formed a little more than 66 million years ago when a meteorite the size of San Francisco tore …