Where is the biggest crater on the earth caused by a meteorite?
The biggest one we know of is the Chicxulub crater on the northern edge of the Yucatan penninsula of Mexico, about 110 miles (180 km) km across. (That’s as far as from Atlanta to Chattanooga., TN) The meteorite that made this crater was about 10 km across (6 miles) and hit about 65 million years ago. This impact must have drastically changed the climate and was probably responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Unfortunately we can’t see this crater directly. It is filled in and covered by seawater in the Gulf of Mexico and recent sediments. It has been studied using geophysical techniques and has been drilled, so quite a bit of information is being accumulated. No big pieces of the actual meteorite have yet been found, but there are small traces of it all over the world at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods (K/T boundary). There were surely even bigger impacts in earth’s history, especially early on. But the earth’s surface evolves through the process of p
