About 65.5 million years ago, the 135 million year reign of the dinosaurs came to an end when a 9 mile-wide asteroid struck the Earth. The impact left a 125-mile-wide crater at Chicxulub in Mexico.

The asteroid strike triggered immediate and radical changes to the environment including a lingering impact winter. Debris from the strike blocked out large amounts of sunlight, making it impossible for plants and plankton to carry out photosynthesis.

There is also evidence of lasting climate change, increased volcanic activity and changes in sea level. However, it is not immediately clear what relationship these events had with the comet strike.

In the end, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event resulted in the loss of three-quarters of all of the species on Earth, including the dinosaurs and most large species. This paved the way for the rise of mammals and ultimately humans.

Recently, a group of researchers met in Merida, Mexico, which is located inside the impact crate to discuss plans for new research on the event. An international team of scientists plans to drill 5,000 feet to take core samples from the crater.

In 2016 the group, which includes researchers from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP).

Led by Sean Gulick, a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) and Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London the team will be sampling the crater’s “peak ring”.

The ring is a cluster of elevated rocks around the crater’s centre. It rises above the floor of the crater, buried beneath 65.5 million years of sediment. Similar rings are present in all craters caused by significant impacts on rocky planetoids.

By analyzing the peak ring of the Chicxulub crater, the researchers hope to uncover details of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction as well as increase our understanding of the mechanism of large impacts on rocky planets.

“What are the peaks made of? And what can they tell us about the fundamental processes of impacts, which is this dominant planetary resurfacing phenomena?” asked Gulick, in a statement.

Among other things, the researchers are interested in examining remnants of life in the rocks of the peak ring. Density readings suggest that the rocks and broken and porous. This could have created crucial microenvironments within the chemically charged, hot environment of the crater. A record of the gradual recovery of marine life following the impact should also be present in the samples.

“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. The hope is we can watch life come back,” said Gulick.

The team will spend about two months extracting the core from beatnik the seabed, after which it will be shipped to Germany and split in half. One half of the core sample will be analyzed by an international team of scientists and the other half will be shipped to a core repository at Texas A&M University for future research needs.

The $10 million project should help to answer some long standing questions about the asteroid strike, the mass extinction that followed and the evolution of life over the 65.5 million years since.