Chicxulub  
2025


A massive thermal pulse, along with molten debris ejected from the impact zone, heated the atmosphere and ignited wildfires that incinerated forests for thousands of kilometres.










Yasmin Smith
Chicxulub 2025
45 data derived glazes on stoneware slip (details)


Chicxulub derives from the ground zero of earth’s Fifth Mass Extinction event, the End Cretaceous—Paleogene Extinction, at the impact zone of the Chicxulub crater. In what is now the Gulf of Mexico, 66 million years ago, an asteroid traveling at 43,000km/hour crashed into earth. The initial impact generated temperatures in the tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. The immense force and heat vaporised most of the asteroid and shattered bedrock hundreds of meters into the crust of the earth. A massive thermal pulse, along with molten debris ejected from the impact zone, heated the atmosphere and ignited wildfires that incinerated forests for thousands of kilometres. The impact and catastrophic climatic events that followed caused the extinction of 75% of species on earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

The 200km-wide impact crater was only discovered in 1978. It lies partly under the Caribbean seabed and partly under rainforest on the Yucatan Peninsula. In 2022, I started to collaborate with Professor Kliti Grice, renowned organic and geo-chemist and world-leading expert in the geological and environmental causes of mass extinction events. Professor Grice leads the Western Australian Organic & Isotope Geochemistry Centre (WA-OIGC) at Curtin University in Western Australia. They provided me with fifteen samples from a core drilling extending from the peak ring of the Chicxulub Crater to a depth of 1.3km below the crater floor.

Chicxulub presents cast ceramic replicas of these samples with a suite of ceramic glazes derived from the chemical analysis of each sample. These are presented in three vertical lines: the overall chemical glaze aesthetic on the left, the major and minor elements in the centre and the trace elements on the right. In descending order, the first five samples of each vertical line come from the post-impact sediments, which washed back into the crater in the subsequent tsunamis, forming calcareous rock. At 620 meters below the surface, the core passes through the extinction line. This is indicated by a break in the vertical lines and is reflected in the sudden shift in the character of the glazes of the ‘target rocks’, which are the five samples below the extinction line. These rocks were chemically and physically transformed by the immense heat and severity of the asteroid impact into a type of melt-bearing impact rock called suevite breccia, containing shocked and unshocked fragments of rocks, minerals and glass, fused and cemented together. The lower five samples are the oldest, known as ‘basement rocks’, where at times melt-rock dikes cut through the formation — visible, for example, in the glaze of sample fourteen.

   
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Chicxulub, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist 
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Chicxulub, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist 
View of the Chicxulub impact site from space. TIM PEAKE, ESA/NASA ©ESA
The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

All Rights Reserved by Respective Authors, 2025.