The meteor that killed the dinosaurs struck what is now the Yucatán region of southeastern Mexico, centered near the town of Chicxulub and extending offshore into the Gulf of Mexico.

Impact location

  • The impact site is called the Chicxulub crater, located partly on the Yucatán Peninsula and partly beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
  • The crater is roughly 150–180 kilometers (about 90–110 miles) wide, marking where the asteroid hit shallow coastal waters rather than deep ocean or dry inland land.

What hit and when

  • The object was likely an asteroid about 10–15 kilometers wide that struck Earth around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
  • This impact is closely linked with the mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and many other species worldwide.

Effects of the impact

  • The collision blasted out an enormous crater, vaporized rock, and threw dust and aerosols high into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight on a global scale.
  • The resulting rapid cooling and climate disruption likely caused the collapse of ecosystems on land and in the oceans, contributing to about three-quarters of species going extinct.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.