Word: crater
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...m.p.h.), the giant comet struck with catastrophic force, punching a hole some 40 km (25 miles) deep through the earth's crust and into the mantle. The violence of the collision 65 million years ago completely vaporized the 8-km-wide (5 miles) comet and blasted out a tremendous crater. Huge rocks, hurled high into the + air, rained down for hundreds of kilometers. A great fireball rose above the atmosphere, carrying with it vast amounts of pulverized debris...
...laureate Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, ignited a scientific debate that still rages today. Opponents of the theory, notably paleontologists, blame the Great Extinction on climatic changes possibly brought on by volcanic activity. If the Alvarezes were correct, they ask, where is the smoking gun? Where is the crater...
Some 130 terrestrial impact craters had been identified, but none of them near the age of 65 million years was large enough to qualify as the Crater. Yet if a comet or asteroid massive enough to cause the extinction had struck the earth, it would have left a crater hundreds of kilometers wide. Some traces would still exist, despite the intervening millenniums of erosion, sedimentation and tectonic-plate movement...
...limestone, centered beneath the town of Chicxulub, on the northern tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, and extending out under the Gulf of Mexico. The nature of the basin, its location and a preliminary estimate of its age suggest that it is the Crater, the one gouged into the earth by the comet or asteroid that killed the dinosaurs...
...press that had arrived, now numbering about 30, follows the mayor around like puppy dogs. We turn a corner, and before us are the mangled remains of a community center. At the base of the center's outer wall, there is a crater 16 feet deep and 25 feet long. The two foot thick concrete walls of the center's bomb shelter have been disenterred and cracked into an infinite number of tiny pieces. Steel rods, separated from the concrete walls they had once reinforced, are strewn all over the place. Soldiers are down in the crater, exhuming shrapnel...