TAMIU Lecture Looks at Asteroid’s Impact on Dinosaur Population

What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? 

That question will be at the center of an upcoming lecture dedicated to the effects of the Chicxulub Asteroid’s impact on México’s Yucatan Peninsula.

The exciting presentation, “Asteroid Impact: The Chicxulub Asteroid and the Death of the Dinosaurs,” happens Wednesday, March 30 at 7 p.m. at Texas A&M International University’s (TAMIU) Center for the Fine and Performing Arts Recital Hall. 

The lecture is free and open to the community.

The lecture receives generous support from Guillermo “Memo” Benavides, and is organized through the combined efforts of TAMIU’s College of Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with the Lamar Bruni Vergara Planetarium.

It is presented by Dr. Sean Gulick, co-chair of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). During the lecture, Dr. Gulick will explain the research completed during a sea expedition in 2016, where his team drilled and collected various core samples found on the rim of the Chicxulub Crater. 

Gulick discusses how the collected samples revealed previously unknown details of what occurred 66 million years ago during the asteroid’s impact, including the drastic changes to Earth’s climate that ultimately led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

His research interests are in tectonic-climate interactions, the role of catastrophism in the geologic record, and marine and planetary geophysical imaging. His current research projects center on tectonic and glacial interactions in Alaska, geohazards and margin evolution of subduction and transform faulting in Alaska, Sumatra, New Zealand, and Japan, and the geologic processes, environmental effects, and habitability of the Cretaceous-Paleogene Chicxulub meteor impact.

Gulick holds a Ph.D. from Lehigh University and a B.S. from the University of North Carolina. He is the co-director of the Center for Planetary Systems Habitability, an interdisciplinary research center, and the associate chair of Lithosphere and Deep Earth Department of Geological Sciences in UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences. 

For more information, contact Peter Davis, Lamar Bruni Vergara Planetarium director, at 956.326.3128 or at peter.davis@tamiu.edu.  Visit the Planetarium online here.

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