January 30, 2008 – Montana Tech, Butte, MT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montana Tech is pleased to host The Ocean Leadership 2007 Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Sean Gulick, on campus for two talks. Dr. Sean Gulick is from the Jackson School of Geosciences, at the University of Texas at Austin.

The first talk titled One Rock to Change the World: The Story of the Chicxulub Impact Crater will be Monday February 4th, at 7:30 p.m., in the Big Butte Room in the Student Union Building.

The second talk titled Importance of Pre-Impact Crustal Structure for the Asymetry of the Chicxulub Impact Crater will be Tuesday February 5th, at 12 p.m., in the Kelly Steward Room in the Student Union Building.

The public and media are invited to both of these lectures.

Sixty-five million years ago a meteor traveling with a velocity of about 20 kilometers per second impacted the Earth near the location of today’s Yucatán Peninsula with the energy equivalent to that of 200 million atomic bombs. The collision resulted in devastation on a planet-wide scale, changed the course of evolution, and left behind what is today known as the Chicxulub impact crater. The crater, now buried under a kilometer-thick section of Cenozoic sediments, represents the only preserved large impact structure in the solar system currently accessible to us. Along with an international team of scientists, Dr. Gulick has been investigating this crater with geophysical methods—seismic, gravity, and magnetics—to understand the role of the impacted rock in the final crater structure, to use the final structure to gain insight into impact cratering processes, and to determine the key characteristics of the impact that contributed to the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous. The next stage of investigation is now underway—with the goal of drilling deep into the crater in a joint program with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP). Dr. Gulick sailed on ODP Leg 196 as a Logging Specialist has served on several IODP advisory panels.
The Consortium for Ocean Leadership is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that represents 95 of the leading public and private ocean research education institutions, aquaria and industry with the mission to advance research, education and sound ocean policy. The organization also manages ocean research and education programs in areas of scientific ocean drilling, ocean observing, ocean exploration, and ocean partnerships.