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Further down, in the underlying granite, the trauma

caused by the impact may have created opportunities

for microorganisms. “At the immediate point of impact,

everything would have been sterilised, so it was certainly

bad for them in the same moment it was bad for the

dinosaurs,” he says. “But in the longer term, it will have

improved conditions for life.”

It’s even possible that impact craters could have

been suitable spots for the origin of life on Earth more

than 3.5 billion years ago. The conditions at the time

of the Chicxulub impact were “radically different” from

those on the early Earth, says Cockell. But the microbial

ecology under the Gulf of Mexico could hint at some of

the biochemical challenges that the first life forms would

have faced, he says.

CRATER CONUNDRUMS

In the days before drilling began, there was a lot of

nervous excitement among the scientists involved.

“I was super stressed before I got on the platform,”

admits Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial

College London and co-chief scientist of the expedition

along with Gulick. But as soon as the “super gorgeous”

cores began to come out of the ground, the stress just

vanished, adds Morgan.

That said, not everything went smoothly. Early on in

the project, a 200m piece of piping fell to the bottom

of the hole, putting a complete stop to drilling. “The

whole thing was a good week of nail-biting before

we actually got the first 50-million-year-old core just

below that point,” says Gulick.

But apart from this glitch, everything went pretty much

to plan, with cores being pulled up to the surface 24

hours a day, seven days a week. “Sometimes we would

succeed in coring 30m a day,” says Gulick. When the

money ran out and it was time to withdraw the drill at

the end of May, the hole stretched for 1,335m below

the seabed, just shy of the project goal of 1,500m. The

deeper cores will be of special interest to geologists like

Gulick and Morgan, as they should help account for the

formation of the so-called ‘peak ring’, a circular mountain

range that lies within the crater, roughly midway between

ABOVE: This tiny grain
of ‘shocked quartz’
on the screen was
taken from the impact
crater – the dark dots
running from its top
left to its bottom right
are deformations that
occurred when the
meteorite hit

ABOVE RIGHT: Checking
equipment on the
drilling platform