If you’re typing "Chicxulub crater real photos" into a search bar, honestly, you’re probably expecting to see a massive, gaping hole in the ground. Something like Meteor Crater in Arizona, just way bigger.
You’re going to be disappointed.
There is no giant hole. At least, not one you can see with your eyes while standing on the beach in Progreso. The "dinosaur killer" is a ghost. It’s a 110-mile-wide scar buried under 66 million years of limestone and ocean. When you look at what people claim are real photos, you're usually looking at one of three things: artistic renders, satellite gravity maps, or a very specific ring of sinkholes.
Why you can't just take a selfie at the crater
The Chicxulub impact happened roughly 66 million years ago. Since then, the Earth has been busy. The Yucatán Peninsula was mostly underwater back then, and over the eons, trillions of tiny marine organisms lived, died, and settled on top of the impact site. This created a layer of limestone nearly a kilometer thick.
Basically, the crater is wearing a very heavy stone blanket.
If you stood at the exact center of the impact today—which is near the town of Chicxulub Puerto—you’d just see a sleepy coastal town. You’ve got the pier, some palm trees, and the Gulf of Mexico. No towering cliffs. No scorched earth.
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But that doesn't mean the "real photos" don't exist. They just don't look like what Hollywood taught us a crater should look like.
The "Ring of Cenotes" is the closest you'll get
If you want a ground-level photo of the crater's influence, look at the cenotes. This is the coolest part of the whole thing.
When the asteroid (which was basically the size of a small city) slammed into the Earth, it didn't just make a dent. It shattered the underlying geology. Millions of years later, as groundwater moved through the peninsula, it found the weakened, fractured rock at the edge of the buried crater rim.
The result? A literal "Ring of Cenotes."
- The Shape: If you look at a map of the Yucatán, you’ll see a perfect semi-circle of blue dots.
- The Reality: These are collapses in the limestone.
- The Connection: These sinkholes follow the exact line of the buried crater wall.
So, when you see a photo of someone diving into the crystal-clear water of a cenote near Mérida, you are looking at the literal ghost of the impact. The fracture lines from that Tuesday 66 million years ago are still dictating where the ground collapses today.
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Satellite images and gravity anomalies
The most famous "real photos" of the Chicxulub crater aren't actually photos in the traditional sense. They are data visualizations. NASA and researchers like Sean Gulick (who co-led the massive 2016 drilling expedition) use gravity and magnetic sensors to "see" through the rock.
Because the rock inside the crater was melted and then refilled with different sediments, it has a different density than the surrounding stone. Satellites can measure these tiny changes in gravity.
When you see those colorful, circular images—usually showing a bright red or blue bullseye—that’s a gravity map. It shows the "Peak Ring," a circle of mountains inside the crater that formed when the ground acted like a liquid and bounced back up after the hit. Think of it like the splash when you drop a rock in a pond, but frozen in stone.
What the rocks actually tell us
If you want the most "real" photo of the Chicxulub event, you have to look at the core samples. In 2016, a team of scientists used a lift boat called the Myrtle to drill deep into the seafloor.
They pulled up cylinders of rock that are absolutely wild to look at.
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I’m talking about "impact melt" and "suevite." These are rocks that were vaporized, melted, and crushed in seconds. In these photos, you see chunks of granite—which usually lives miles deep in the crust—shot up to the surface. You see "shocked quartz," which only forms under the kind of pressure you find in nuclear explosions or asteroid impacts.
Honestly, a photo of a gray, shattered rock core from 600 meters under the sea is more "real" than any artist's depiction of a fireball. It’s the physical receipt of the day the world ended for the dinosaurs.
Where to go if you want to see it for yourself
You can’t see the crater, but you can feel the scale of it. If you’re traveling to the Yucatán, do these three things to get the "Chicxulub experience":
- Visit the Science Museum: The Museo de Ciencias en el Cráter de Chicxulub in Parque Científico Tecnológico de Yucatán is the gold standard. They have the actual data, the core samples, and the best explanations of why the ground looks the way it does.
- Map the Cenotes: Don't just go to one. Look at a map and realize that the one you're swimming in is part of a 110-mile arc. That scale is hard to wrap your brain around until you're standing in it.
- Chicxulub Puerto: Go to the town square. There’s a modest monument there. It’s a weird feeling standing in a quiet, sunny park knowing that this was once "ground zero" for the most violent day in the history of our planet.
The crater isn't a tourist attraction you look at. It's a geological structure you inhabit. The "real photos" are found in the subtle curves of the coastline and the deep, cold water of the sinkholes.
To truly understand the impact, look into the 2016 IODP Expedition 364 results. They mapped the peak ring with seismic data that shows the subterranean mountains are still there, standing tall under the waves, forever hidden from the sun.