Explosive interaction of impact melt and seawater following the Chicxulub impact event
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The impact of asteroids and comets with planetary surfaces is one of the most catastrophic, yet ubiquitous, geological processes in the solar system. The Chicxulub impact event, which has been linked to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction marking the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, is arguably the most significant singular geological event in the past 100 million years of Earth’s history. The Chicxulub impact occurred in a marine setting. How quickly the seawater re-entered the newly formed basin after the impact, and its effects of it on the cratering process, remain debated. Here, we show that the explosive interaction of seawater with impact melt led to molten fuel–coolant interaction (MFCI), analogous to what occurs during phreatomagmatic volcanic eruptions. This process fractured and dispersed the melt, which was subsequently deposited subaqueously to form a series of well-sorted deposits. These deposits bear little resemblance to the products of impacts in a continental setting and are not accounted for in current classification schemes for impactites. The similarities between these Chicxulub deposits and the Onaping Formation at the Sudbury impact structure, Canada, are striking, and suggest that MFCI and the production of volcaniclastic-like deposits is to be expected for large impacts in shallow marine settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".