EPS Colloquium – David Kring, Harvard Radcliffe Fellow

The Chicxulub Crater and Implications for the Impact Origin of Life Hypothesis

When we discovered the Chicxulub impact crater and linked it to the terminal Cretaceous mass extinction event, I also uncovered evidence of a long-lived, impact-generated hydrothermal system.  Such systems would have been common during the Hadean when, based on our analyses of lunar samples, the Earth was blanketed by impact craters, some the size of modern-day continents.  Weaving together those observations of Chicxulub and early Solar System bombardment, I proposed the impact origin of life hypothesis: that similar hydrothermal systems, produced by impact cratering events during the Hadean, were ideal crucibles for the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. Deep drilling into the Chicxulub crater continues to provide tests of that concept, the results of which will be discussed in this presentation.

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