364 Expedition

Many years ago, when humans still didn't exist, took place on catastrophic fact wich was responsible for deleting the dinosaurs from the visage of the earth. Many years ago an immense meteorite more than 10 Km in diameter crashed into the Erth. Now, the project waited by researchers is about to carry on: drilling under the ocean bed of the Chicxulub crater, the enormous hole opened 66 million years ago where now we know as Yucatan peninsula (Mexic). 

On 13th of April, an international scientific team will set off from the Mexico gulf to the drill platform which is 30Km open sea. This will be the first time that the crater has a submarine drilling. The main question the project try to work out is: what that impact was so catastrophic? The scientific team tries to get more knowledge about the formations of the crater and the environmental and ecologic effects of the impact. Another of the objectives is to study what were the conditions that make possible the return of the sea life in the area after the impact. 

The drillings will take place in a characteristic structure that also have other craters on the Moon or in Mart. This position is know as rings-peaks and is circular mountain ranges. The crater is about 180 and 200 Km in diameter. On earth, there are only two bigger and both are also older, one is in Vredefort (South Africa) and the other one in Canada, both formed 2000 million years ago. The problem is that the zone has been modifying by the erosion and can't be investigate properly by scientific. 

The plan for the study is to drill 500m the first week and then over tow month drill one kilometer more checking the surface and collecting signs of minerals and fossils. But the scientific team in charge of the project are sure that it could figure out more mysteries that they have been bottomless until now, for example, the global warming wich took place 55 million years ago and was responsible for the end of the giant birds.


It seems unreal that now, after millions of years, we can know that one-day enormous dinosaurs walk the earth for thousand of years. I think it's incredible how analyzing the earth we can know how was the Erth millions of years ago, who lived in there or what happened. These kind o studies are like "the pictures were never made" because they give us a real image of the world. Maybe we can think that the study of the dinosaurs has no relation with us because they lived million of years before the humans, but the fact is that their extinction makes possible the life of the mammals and, therefore, the evolution till our times.