Meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs also created record-breaking hydrothermal system
Published: 9 June 2026
The meteorite which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected.
The meteorite which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected.
The finding has surprised the international team of researchers behind it, who came to their conclusions by pairing sophisticated new analysis of samples taken from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico with computer modelling of the geological effects of the meteorite impact which formed the crater 66 million years ago.
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, casts new light on how life may have first been incubated in hydrothermal systems in the earliest chapters of the Earth’s history, and could help direct the search for life on other planets.
Despite the devastation the meteorite’s impact caused on the surface, the immense heat brought together fractured rocks and hot water underground, creating a hydrothermal system beneath the crater. The researchers provide evidence that the system persisted for at least eight million years, around four times longer than previous estimates, making it the longest‑lived impact‑generated hydrothermal system yet documented.
The Chicxulub crater was formed when an asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula in México around 66 million years ago. The impact of the 10km-wide asteroid was catastrophic, sparking an extinction-level event which wiped out around three-quarters of the planet’s plants and animals, including all the non-avian dinosaurs.
It left behind a crater nearly 200km in diameter, and the crushing effects of the impact reached deep into the Earth’s crust. In that violent environment, rocks melted by the impact met seawater from the Gulf of Mexico, creating porous material containing countless tiny pockets of water heated by the impact - conditions which are well-suited to sustaining microbial life.
In 2016, an team of scientists set out to the crater to drill into the peak ring of the crater as part of Expedition 364, organised by the International Ocean Discovery Programme and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Programme. The samples they collected included a potassium‑rich type of feldspar that formed as a result of hot fluid circulation after the impact.
Dr Annemarie Pickersgill
Dr Annemarie Pickersgill of SUERC – Centre for the Isotope Sciences was part of Expedition 364. At SUERC in East Kilbride, Scotland, she used a technique called argon-argon dating to accurately determine the age of the feldspar samples. The outcomes of the analysis showed that a range of ages for the feldspar samples from the time of the impact, 66 million years ago to approximately 58 million years ago - an eight million year window.
Dr Pickersgill said: “Wherever on Earth you find flowing warm water, you find life, and we’ve known for a while that asteroid impacts create hydrothermal systems. Previous research undertaken in the early 2000s suggested that the system created by the Chicxulub impact lasted for about two million years. Those findings were based on computer models which were, even at the time, regarded as conservative estimates, but we were still surprised by the outcomes of our research.”
Using updated computer simulations based on the new findings, the team worked to identify which geological conditions were most likely to produce such a long-lived system. The simulations modelled a range of physical conditions based on the data collected during the drilling project, combined with more complex geology data developed by scientists during the period since the initial modelling two decades ago.
The outcomes of the modelling indicate that a combination of high rock permeability, sustained heat from the impact, and natural geothermal conditions likely helped the system persist for millions of years, matching the eight-million-year timeframe identified by the feldspar analysis.
The team’s findings could have implications for scientists’ understanding of how life formed on the early Earth and for the search for life on terrestrial planetary bodies where asteroid impacts have been much more common.
Dr Evangelos Christou, formerly a PhD student at the University of Glasgow’s College of Science & Engineering, is a co-author of the paper. His work focused on the enhanced hydrodynamic simulations used by the team. He said: “Advancements in computational methods enable researchers to simulate complex natural systems with unprecedented realism, bringing us even closer to unveiling the mysteries of the chaotic physical processes that shape Earth and other planetary bodies through geological timescales.
"We used those advances to explore in unprecedented detail the complex interactions between heat, rock composition and water flow the Chicxulub impact induced, allowing us to explore the ways that the hydrothermal systems changed over time and determine how long they stayed active below the crater.”
Dr Pickersgill added: “We know that planets like Mars, which don’t have the protection of a thick atmosphere like Earth does, have experienced many, many impacts during their history. That includes periods when water may have been much more abundant, and big enough impacts could have spurred the formation of long-lived hydrothermal systems which could have supported life.
“The porous, fractured rocks created by impacts create microenvironments where micro-organisms can be protected from radiation and extreme temperatures. Those conditions give life the chance to take hold and flourish, and that is likely what happened here on Earth billions of years ago. As we look to the future of space exploration, these findings could help future missions to other planets determine which impact craters might have been most likely to sustain life.”
Researchers from the University of Glasgow, Purdue University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Universities Space Research Association, HNU Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, Imperial College London, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Arizona, Stanford University, Arizona State University and the University of St Andrews also contributed to the research and co-authored the paper.
The team’s paper, titled ‘A long-lived impact-generated hydrothermal system at the Chicxulub impact structure’, is published in Communications Earth & Environment.
The research was supported by funding from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, the Yucatán State Government and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Natural Science & Engineering Research Council of Canada, the University of Glasgow, the Leverhulme Trust, and UKRI’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
First published: 9 June 2026