Message #264951

[Manetho]

Joanna Morgan: "Within a few seconds it formed a crater 100km wide and 30km deep"

The team is using a "liftboat" called Myrtle as its drilling platform.

This will position itself close to the Yucatan Peninsula coast, jacking itself up on three legs to make for a steady station.

To reach the rocks of the peak ring, the drill will first have to navigate the thick muds on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

"There's less interest in the first 650m before the K-Pg (Cretaceous-Palaeogene) boundary, which is the carbonates," said Dave Smith, from the British Geological Survey.

"We've taken the view that we will open the hole to 500m and then set a casing and start coring. And we'll core continuously then down to the target depth which is 1,500m," the operations manager on the project added.

Some of the early core samples to come up should show evidence of how quickly life returned to the impact zone. Marine organisms should have re-established themselves in this sterile area on the scale of thousands of years.

Deeper cores are likely to make contact with the tsunami deposits that sloshed back and forth in the immediate aftermath of the impact.

The true peak ring rocks are at a depth of about 800m and below.