Oil and dinosaurs

May 18, 2015
It was at about this time a year ago that deepwater technologies pioneered by the oil and gas industry were used-albeit fruitlessly-in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the exact fate of which has become one of the world's great mysteries.

Matt Zborowski
Staff Writer

It was at about this time a year ago that deepwater technologies pioneered by the oil and gas industry were used-albeit fruitlessly-in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the exact fate of which has become one of the world's great mysteries.

The attempt, however, served as a reminder that outside of aerospace, no other industry has been more active in going where no man has gone before. Geophysicist Glen Penfield did just that in 1978 when he made one of the planet's most fascinating geophysical discoveries, perhaps confirming hypotheses as to how the dinosaurs met their fate.

Working for Mexico's state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Penfield took part in an airborne magnetic survey offshore Chicxulub Pueblo while scouring for oil drilling prospects. When he procured the data, he came across an unfamiliar, 125-mile-wide structure a mile beneath the Yucatan Peninsula and stretching 70 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. It didn't appear to be a volcanic structure, but rather resembled a massive impact crater-one that could potentially wipe out entire species.

The finding was mostly overlooked at the time, and it wasn't until 12 years later that Penfield was contacted by graduate student Alan Hildebrand, whose research had found evidence of an asteroid impact somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. Together they obtained breccia samples from original Pemex drilling cores in the would-be impact area, and confirmed their hypothesis via shocked quartz samples.

The result helped shape humanity's understanding of Earth's relatively recent living history. As it turned out, the asteroid, which measured 9 miles long, was estimated to have impacted roughly 65.5 million years ago, creating an apocalyptic scene responsible for exterminating the dinosaurs.

Chicxulub crater drilling

Major drilling activity returned to the Chicxulub crater in 2001-02 with the Yaxcopoil-1 borehole, which reached a total depth of 5,000 ft in the crater's southern portion, 62 km from the crater center. About 900 m of intact core samples were recovered and accompanying wireline geophysical measurements were taken, enabling "three-dimensional insight and a better understanding of impact processes," according to records from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program.

Those samples represent a large portion of the few samples taken from the crater over the years. However, it was reported this month that geophysicists are planning a new drilling expedition in 2016. Sean Gulick, a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), and scientists from the UK and Mexico have their sights set on core samples from near the center of the crater, where the "peak ring" resides.

The Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas describes the peak ring as "an enigmatic ring of topographically elevated rocks that surrounds the crater's center, rises above its floor and has been buried during the past 65.5 million years by sediments." Samples from the area would paint a clearer picture of the impact and the fallout.

Gulick also hopes to get a snapshot of what was living within the peak ring after the time of impact. "The sediments that filled in the [crater] should have the record for organisms living on the sea floor and in the water that were there for the first recovery after the mass extinction event," he said. "The hope is we can watch life come back."

Valuable work

As with oil and gas exploration, the team will drill 5,000 ft under the seafloor from an offshore platform. The $10-million expedition is expected to last 2 months. Half of analyses of the resulting core will be divided among an international team of scientists from the US, UK, Mexico, and other nations, while the remaining half will be saved for future research needs at a core repository at Texas A&M University.

The value of their work will far surpass that of commercial oil pay, and no doubt enthrall those with even the slightest geologic interest, bringing a new meaning to "field life."