Credit: Painting by Donald E. Davis.

Live Science has a story of how scientists are planning to dig 5000 feet (1500 meters) deep into the Chicxulub crater to bring up a giant core.  The core will be used to study the formation of the crater.  The project is in the planning stage and is slated to begin in the spring of 2016.

Why now? “The Chicxulub impact crater has been a remarkable scientific opportunity for the 20 years since it’s been discovered,” said Sean Gulick, of The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics. And, for the first time, scientists have subsurface images from the offshore part of the crater, so they can pinpoint a spot for sampling. They chose a spot along the crater’s peak ring — a ring of mountainlike structures around the center of the crater.

By sampling there, the researchers can get a clearer picture of ancient biological and geological processes.

Scientists think that, when a big rock smashes into Earth at high enough velocities, the collision causes the crust temporarily to act sort of like a liquid, first forming a so-called transient crater (like the indentation that forms on a lake surface after a rock is thrown in), and the center rebounds, or splashes, upward and then outward. “We think the peak ring is the record of the material that rebounded and splashed outward,” Gulick told Live Science.