Meteor Theory. It all started a long time ago.

I came to Mexico on the 14th of February 2015 and I’ve been fascinated by the country ever since. Certain themes seem ingrained into the culture like the Red and green colors, The association with ancient cultures like the Maya and The Aztecs and the symbolism behind Snakes and Birds. These themes seem to be so much a part of the modern-day Mexican culture whilst at the same time being shrouded in mystery and hidden symbolism that hasn’t been fully understood for a thousand years.

I have been living and working in Mexico for over 6 years now. I am a cenote guide and diving instructor. I meet divers who travel from all over the world to scuba dive in the cenotes that are located around the Yucatan peninsula.

What is a cenote? You might be asking yourself why do divers travel from all around the world to dive in them? A cenote is a sinkhole that forms in a karst (porous rock like limestone) landscape that extends down to underlying caves that usually have water running through them.

How the Meteor shaped the landscape of the Yucatan

The story of the cenotes is fascinating and a great place for me to start my story.

All of the rocks in the Yucatan peninsula are limestone. Limestone is formed under the sea. All of the sea creatures that die fall to the bottom of the sea. Over time and with the increasing pressure of more sedimentary deposits falling on top of them, form limestone. It is very rich in calcium because it consists mainly of shells, bones and dead coral. It’s funny because geologists don’t call limestone rocks in the true geological sense. They describe limestone as a sedimentary composition. It will only become a rock if it undergoes a high level of compression or heat that will change it into a different molecular structure.

So 100 million years ago this place would have been completely different. The temperature of the world was higher so the sea level was higher. The whole of the Yucatan peninsula was underwater. It was a massive coral reef system. It would have been awesome to come scuba diving here back then. We would have seen amazing things.

Meteor in Space

Then 65.8 million years ago the meteor came hurtling through space. A 10 to 15 kilometer wide body came burning through the atmosphere. They say that if it would have hit a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later we wouldn’t be here because it would have hit the deep sea. But it is because it hit this shallow coral reef system that it ejected vast amounts of debris into the atmosphere. It is this debris that was pushed up into the higher atmosphere that caused a catastrophic global event. It blocked out the light and heat of the sun killing off the last of the non-avian (birds) dinosaurs because birds are related to the dinosaurs. It can be funny to think that the humble chicken that we can see flapping around local yards and that we happily dine on, is distantly related to the mighty tyrannosaurus rex who would have happily devoured us whole had we been living at the same time.

It would have been an awesome sight to see. As the meteor hit the atmosphere it would have parted moving the air away causing it to ripple like the waves in a lake when you throw in a stone. The waves rippled around the earth. We, humans, are finely tuned to sense even the slightest variation in pressure.

Divers experience this as they descend in the water. The increasing pressure compresses a tiny dead air space that we have in our ears. We must equalize the pressure in that dead airspace as we descend. If we don’t we will feel an increased amount of pain and will then break our eardrums. It is a similar sensation that you feel when flying on an airplane when it is coming down to land. When there is an explosion, for example by a gas leak or a grenade, there is harm caused by flying debris and by heat but the most harmful part of the explosion is the pressure wave that causes internal damage to our body. So first came the pressure wave.

Then it hit the Sea it caused immense tidal waves miles high of boiling water. Fish have been found high up above sea level that date to the time of the meteor. Little beads of glass were found inside the fish. This glass can only be formed under extreme heat. So this boiling water miles high would have flowed over the land destroying all the plants and animals that were there.

Meteor hits the Earth

Then it hit the rock.

“What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?”

Answer: They merge and an infinite amount of energy is released.
Given that an infinite amount of energy is impossible in a finite universe this is an impossible scenario in our universe. So if we are going to theoretically create a new universe where an infinitely unstoppable force exists and an infinitely unstoppable object exists it’s not going to have the same laws of physics as our universe. So what’s going to happen is anything you want to happen given the theoretical laws of physics you can create to accommodate a universe where an infinitely unstoppable force could ever meet an infinitely immovable object.

As the meteor hit the rock an extraordinarily large amount of energy in the form of heat, light and sound was released. So much heat was released that the rock melted. Changing from a solid into a liquid. The compression forces were so great that they couldn’t turn into a gas but instead formed plasma. Plasma is the 4th sttee of matter. Solid, Liquid, Gas being the first three. In this state, the meteor and all of the surrounding matter would have acted like a fluid.

Initially, we might think that the impact would be similar to that of a stone being thrown into the sand. However, it was more similar to a droplet of water falling into a puddle. albeit a super hot massive droplet of water. For about 15 minutes the meteor and the impact site turned into a fluid. In this time the meteor was absorbed into the earth and then like our droplet of water hitting our puddle it splashed back up again. As the liquid rock splashed up into the atmosphere its surface area increases and it cools back down into the solid rock. as it cools the central area can no longer support its weight and comes crashing in on itself. Leaving what looks like a jagged crown of rocks.

Chicxulub Impact Crater

The crater is located near the village of Chicxulub in the northwest of the Yucatan peninsula. But there are no visible signs of the crater site on the surface. The temperature of the world remained high for many millions of years, so as the massive waves of water dissipated and the temperature cooled, the seawater washed back over the crater and sedimentary deposits have covered the. They have found microscopic creatures in the sedimentary rock just above the crater, so we know that life came back there surprisingly quickly after the impact. Millions of years of sedimentary deposit were laid on top of the crater hiding it from the world.

So why is the meteor important to the formation of the cenotes? When the meteor hit the earth it changed the structure of the rock. Limestone is a porous rock. Water flows through tiny cracks in it. As it flows through it dissolves the rock making the cracks bigger. The cracks turn into massive underground caves full of flowing water. When the cave gets so big at some point it can no longer support the weight of the rock above and, like the straw that broke the camels back, the roof comes crashing in forming a Cenote.

Chicxulub Impact Effects

The rock that was changed due to the intense heat of the impact is not porous so the water has to flow around it. As the water flowed around this big round ball of rock it has formed a ring of cenotes. About a quarter of a circle curving around the northwestern tip of the peninsula has an extremely high density of cenotes that correlates with the impact site.

Some people think that individual cenotes are caused by individual cenotes. That is not true. The meteor affects the rock but way down below our feet. But what is below affects what is above. As the weight pushes down and with changing conditions the rocks above are affected by the damage of the impact below.

Like a stone hitting the windscreen of a car. There are cracks from the center that go out in a straight line. But there are also circular cracks that radiate away from the center. There are two pressure waves. one that goes along the surface and one that goes down to the earth mantle and then bounces back up again. Where these two waves meet, like two waves in the sea that come from different directions, they form a massive wave. There are circles of damaged rock that radiate away from the center of the impact. The damage from the impact is a kilometer below our feet but it has weakened the sedimentary rock that has been deposited above.

On the east coast of the peninsula, these radial lines run parallel to the shore. Over time caves have formed along these lines. So the caves around here aren’t just water flowing directly out to the sea like a normal cave system, it has created a grid of caves. The breaks that run parallel to the shore connect all along the coast creating the largest underwater cave system on earth.

Meteor Impact Theory

The thing I find most fascinating about the Meteor is more to do with the process that the meteorite theory has gone through. Although the meteor impact was millions of years ago, I am older than the theory of the meteorite.

When I was born, had you gone into a university and claimed that a meteor had collided with the earth 65.8 million years ago and that was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, you would have been laughed at because there was no evidence of a meteor. There was, however, a large amount of evidence that showed that the dinosaurs died out over a long time.

Then shortly after I was born the Alvarezs a father and son team came up with the theory of a meteor collision to explain a chared layer in the rock now called the K-Pg boundary. This chared layer of rock can be found all around the world. Above the boundary, there are no dinosaur bones. Some of the first scientists to work on the theory were laughed at because of all the evidence that pointed to a dying off over a period of time, not a single event. They joked that maybe the dinosaurs committed suicide because they knew the meteor was coming.

The Meteor that killed the Dinosaurs

It wasn’t until 2010 that a team of International scientists endorsed the meteor impact theory. Now it is scientific fact but 40 years ago it was a crazy idea with no evidence.

So initially the people studying the meteor theory were the crazy ones. Then one day they found the meteor site and they weren’t crazy anymore and everyone who didn’t believe in the meteor theory had to do a major paradigm shift or else they would become the crazy ones.