Moon Crater Studied For Asteroid That Caused Dinosaur Extinction: Scientists

It's a question that has baffled the world for centuries: How could the dinosaurs just get wiped out from the face of the earth? Scientists have decided to turn to the moon for answers that go beyond what we have all accepted as fact -- that an asteroid struck and killed them all. They are hoping that through the gigantic craters on the moon's Schrödinger basin, the key to understanding the effect of falling celestial bodies will finally be unlocked.

According to The Daily Mail, before shifting their attention to Schrödinger, scientists and researchers have been busy drilling on a well-known impact site near the Yucatan Peninsula. Their target is the 125-mile wide Chicxulub -- a crater that was formed when a giant asteroid struck our planet 65 million years. It's what turned out to be the beginning of a series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters that eventually killed all the dinosaurs, along with nearly all plant and animal life on Earth.

After the crater was formed, it got buried under layers of rock and sediment through Earth's natural processes. Digging through these layers has provided a clearer insight into how the planet and its inhabitants recovered and flourished again after the cataclysmic extinction event.

According to Sean Gulick in a NPR report, a geophysicist and one of those leading the Chicxulub expedition: "We went through a remarkable amount of the post-impact world." He added, "We've got all these limestones and rocks that contain the fossils from the world after the impact, all the things that evolved from the few organisms that survived."

As further exploration into the Chixculub crater continues, other scientists have turned to the cosmos, to our moon in particular, for more clues on how our planet could have survived and recovered from such a devastating occurrence. After all, similar formations are likely to have similar features and possibly the same origins.

Schrödinger basin's appearance is believed to be a mirror image of how the Chixculub crater looked after the deadly asteroid's initial impact on earth. And while Chixculub is buried beneath the Earth, Schrödinger is fully exposed on the moon's surface. And it's secrets are just waiting to be unlocked.

Through intensive research that is expected to continue on both formations -- one under ground and the other above the Earth -- and with the technology available to us, we may not have to wait too long before we can fully understand the mystery that has surrounded the dinosaur extinction and the processes that have rebuilt and reshaped our planet.