Chicxulub #4: Sediment

What types of changes in the matter can happen when a meteor impacts the surface?
The rocks found in an impact crater and the ejecta they throw out can help us reconstruct what happened to
the matter in a meteor impact. Larger meteorite impact craters often leave little of the meteor material in the
crater itself.  But they do often produce fragments of shocked quartz and tiny glass spheres in the rock below
the crater. Shocked quartz is formed when quartz crystals undergo a sudden pulse of high magnitude forces
(great pressure). This produces identifiable microfractures in the crystals.

The tiny glass spheres are formed when surface rock is melted in the impact,
ejected into the air as a spray of small heated droplets, and then quickly cool
off and crystallize (resolidify) as fall back down to Earth.

Most meteors contain a much higher concentration of iridium than is found

on Earth. A sedimentary layer of rock and clay that contains this material, known as the K-Pg boundary can be
found at 100s of sites around the world. It contains tiny glass spheres, and just above that iridium and pieces
of shocked quartz. The iridium concentrations found in these samples and radiometric dating of this layer
suggests it was distributed world wide from a meteor impact, 65 to 66 million years ago.

How does the distribution of these sediments compare?

Data from various K-Pg boundary sites are shown in the
graphs to the right. Apparent distance on the x-axis is
measured from the center of the Chicxulub impact crater.
The dashed line is the best-fit curve through all the data
points. Can. is Canada, Den. is Denmark, NZ is New Zealand,
and numbers (e.g. 1258A) are different sea-floor sample
sites.
The K-Pg boundary sites in North America have the largest
number of shocked quartz grains with > 1400 grains per g of
sample.  Sites further away from the crater (between 4000
and 8250 km) have a few 10 s of grains per g, and sites
located at distances of > 9000 km from the crater have a
range of between 5 and 17 grains per g of sample.  Notice

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that the average grain size found at each site also gets smaller with increasing distance from the impact site

What do these distribution patterns tell us?

The impactor that formed the Chicxulub crater melted some of the crust where it hit and ejected most of it
outward at an angle that resulted in it falling over North America and some of the Pacific Ocean. The iridium
from the vaporized meteor and smaller pieces of shocked quartz were ejected higher and further away.
 Some of the smallest pieces would have been ejected back out into space. They then would have fallen back
down a bit later over the entire Earth.

The oblong shape of the Chicxulub crater provides additional evidence for the skewed distribution of
materials in the K-P boundary. It also suggests that the asteroid that formed it, hit the Earth’s surface at a
shallow angle, splattering more debris and larger pieces of debris to the northwest, over North America and
the nearby parts of the Pacific Ocean than in other directions.

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