Many of us have heard the theory that the dinosaurs disappeared because of a large impact by a meteor. Supposedly this kicked up so much dust and dirt into the atmosphere that many of the plants the dinos depended on for food stopped growing. The dinosaurs that depended on this plants died and the other dinosaurs that depended on those dinosaurs for food then died. There is a second theory however that says the impact caused sulphur to rise into the atmosphere blocking the sun. This sulphur caused acid rain which killed the plants. A more obscure theory states that forest fires were triggered by hot debris from the impact causing massive amounts of smoke to enter the atmosphere and block the sun. As you can see no one is quite sure what happened. The first theory is the most popular.

Scientists seemed to find more and more clues that this was true. As they would dig they would find a strata of dirt that indicated that this happened because of its material content. They began to believe that somewhere this was a large crater, but they didn't know where it might be. Some thought it might rest under the ocean and that's why it wasn't visible.

On March 6, 2003 NASA released a map of North America made from the Shuttle Radar pictures, these pictures were from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Data. The Shuttle had mapped North America from Canada to Central America. An amazing thing showed up in the pictures. There was a huge crater hidden in the limestone plateau of the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula. NASA referred to this picture "as a show stopper".

Chicxulub Impact Crater Region, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
Source: NASA

The crater is called the Chicxulub crater. It is believed that this is where the impact took place that may be responsible not only for the demise of the dinosaurs but also about seventy percent of live on earth. This crater was referred to by NASA as "a smoking gun". Not only was the crater found but the pictures have given us knowledge about the topography of Alaska, Canada and the Aleutian Islands along with Mexico and Central American that was heretofore unknown.

Full Map From NASA

The Chicxulub Impact Crater Region is very subtle. If you were to walk over the region you might not know there was even a crater there, yet the crater is three miles in diameter and about fifteen feet deep. It is believed that limestone sediments filled the crater after the impact.

The data was finished processing in February of 2003. There were more that eight terabytes of data which was refined into two hundred billion measurements. The space shuttle Endeavour recorded the data.