FRED ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

Where did the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit Earth? The study that identified a gigantic buried crater at Chicxulub in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula as the impact site for the asteroid that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs is a great detective story. It included the discovery of the crater through airborne geomagnetic surveys in the late 1970s, and, soon afterwards, the independent realisation that the dinosaurs probably disappeared in the aftermath of an asteroid impact. Both the crater and the impact have now been reliably dated to an age of 66 million years, and Chicxulub has been the accepted location of the impact since the early 1990s. If you have a space question for Fred, email it to editorial@ausgeo.com.au