B.B.C. Article
The effort to drill into the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Mexico has been declared an outstanding success.
A UK/US-led team has spent the past seven weeks coring into the deep bowl cut out of the Earth's surface 66 million years ago by the asteroid that hastened the end of the dinosaurs.
Rocks nearly 1,300m below the Gulf seafloor have been pulled up.
The samples are expected to reveal new insights on the scale of the impact and its environmental effects.

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B.B.C. Article
Chicxulub 'dinosaur crater' investigation begins in earnest
Scientists have obtained remarkable new insights into the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
They have been examining rocks from the crater that the 15km-wide space object dug out of what is now the Gulf of Mexico some 66 million years ago.
The team says it can see evidence in these materials for how life returned to the scene soon after the calamity.
Descendants of these small organisms are likely thriving today in amongst the crater's smashed up materials.
The international project has shipped the hundreds of metres it drilled from beneath the Gulf floor earlier this year to the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, at the University of Bremen, Germany.
It is here that the cores are being catalogued, analysed and archived.

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B.B.C. Article
Asteroid strike made 'instant Himalayas'
Scientists say they can now describe in detail how the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs produced its huge crater.
The reconstruction of the event 66 million years ago was made possible by drilling into the remnant bowl and analysing its rocks.
These show how the space impactor made the hard surface of the planet slosh back and forth like a fluid.
At one stage, a mountain higher than Everest was thrown up before collapsing back into a smaller range of peaks.
"And this all happens on the scale of minutes, which is quite amazing," Prof Joanna Morgan from Imperial College London, UK, told BBC News.



The researchers report their account in this week's edition of Science Magazine.
Their study confirms a very dynamic, very energetic model for crater formation, and will go a long way to explaining the resulting cataclysmic environmental changes.
The debris thrown into the atmosphere likely saw the skies darken and the global climate cool for months, perhaps even years, driving many creatures into extinction, not just the dinosaurs.
The team spent May to June this year drilling a core through the so-called Chicxulub Crater, now buried under ocean sediments off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

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