(Puerto) Progreso is, par excellence, the seaside resort of the meridians, especially in July-August, when heat and humidity tighten in these tropical parts of the Americas and make the atmosphere stifling.
During summer, homes and businesses on the waterfront overlooking the Gulf of Mexico fill with temporary guests.
Some of these homes are small, inelegant but picturesque houses that seem to squeeze together to enjoy the gentle coming and going of the sea.
Others, further from the center of the village, are sophisticated and open houses that the North Americans build to take refuge there from the winter frigidity.
In high season of Caribbean tourism, huge cruises dock at the village's pier, the longest in Mexico, with a modicum of 6.5 km.
So, the gringos disembark and wander around the malecon, before and after boarding vans and buses and heading off towards Mérida, Chichen Itza and other historical and natural places in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Often, despite the water being muddy all year round, they find the seaside flooded with bathers and guests from the region, a crowd given over to a sunny, exotic and amphibious celebration of life and their free time.
This is the picture we painted of living and hot. The one we found on a November morning almost turning to December is quite different.
After three days of cold front, the sky returns to blue, much more common in these parts. The sun shines, but with measured power. When we pass to the other side of the front of houses, the malecon it is delivered to the Norths, the prevailing and furious winds that blow down the gulf from the northern ends of America.
It's also deserted. The fact that we do not see a soul encourages us to flee and explore other corners of the top of the peninsula.
An iguana in the vicinity of the Tulum Wind Temple. The devastation caused by the Chicxulub meteorite will have wiped out all land animals weighing more than 25kg. Of the huge predominant dinosaurs, much smaller specimens remain.
About Chicxulub. And the Abrupt Extinction of Dinosaurs.
All morning, we traversed an equally desolate domain of the Yucatan. We skimmed a circumference of the Earth in times of such disembowelment that its destruction gave rise to a kind of Global Winter and the consequent extinction of the larger species, especially the (non-flying) dinosaurs that have long dominated the planet.
The theory of the impact of a 15km diameter meteorite, about 65 million years ago, gained acceptance among scientists as the most pressing explanation for the sudden disappearance of these prehistoric reptiles.
In 1978, Glen Penfield, a geophysicist researching oil for the Mexican company PEMEX detected a crater about 300km in diameter.
It was named Chicxulub, a village a few kilometers south of Progreso, which we approached after admiring the flocks of flamingos in the brackish waters of the El Corchito Ecological Reserve and, to the east, in the Laguna Rosada.
Flamingos feed in the brackish lagoon of the El Corchito Nature Reserve, an area dammed up on the earth's edge from the meteorite impact.
The reserve predates the port of Chicxulub, a kind of marine extension of the town namesake of the interior, in turn, close to Dzibilchaltún, a smaller Mayan archaeological site that we also take advantage of to take a look at.
As far as El Corchito and Laguna Rosada are concerned, we can see on the map that they are just two domains of the vast dammed area below the almost insular coastline that encloses the Yucatan.
Such weakness – or geological fault – turns out to be only broader and more exposed than those that dot the peninsula, including its countless cenotes, (deep sinkholes) and the underground rivers that supply and connect them.
This Swiss-cheese panorama is, after all, the geological consequence of the sidereal phenomenon that killed the dinosaurs.
An Apocalyptic Impact
Recent studies carried out in the shallow bed of the Gulf of Mexico allowed to conclude that the meteorite has fallen in one of the least favorable places on the face of the Earth.
If the impact had occurred a few hours before or after, the most likely would be that the meteorite would have reached a deep area of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean and that depth would have cushioned the impact.
At the time and place in which it occurred, the meteorite fell into a shallow sea, covered with a kind of mineral plaster.
The collision was devastating. It opened a crater in the Earth's crust that was 100km long and 30km deep. This crater later collapsed and more than doubled.
An opening in the predominant layer of limestone that covers the terrestrial area of the Yucatan Peninsula affected by the meteorite impact.
Today, its marine section (almost all) is covered by XNUMX meters of sediment. The terrestrial, in turn, was under a layer of limestone, as we have already seen, dotted with sinkholes and related erosive phenomena.
The explosion generated by the impact of the meteorite had a power equivalent to ten billion atomic bombs "Little Boy”, the one that the B-52 “Enola gay” dropped on Hiroshima. It generated earthquakes and tsunamis that swept much of the planet. It released huge amounts of vaporized rock and sulfur, as well as soot that also combined particles of other substances.
Joanna Morgan, a British professor and scientist who participated in the most recent investigations, says that 325 gigatonnes of sulfur were projected, an estimate that guarantees conservative.
Whatever the amount, an apocalyptic cloud obscured the atmosphere. It so blocked the sun's rays that the temperature dropped between 8 and 17°C and several areas suffered catastrophic droughts.
In the northern hemisphere, climate change was more pronounced and lasting than in the south. This, in an era when the Earth's climate had been cooling for some time due to an intensification of volcanic activity.
It is believable that the rainfall had dragged part of these vaporized particles back to the sea. Kunio Kahio, a renowned Japanese scientist, argues, however, that a substantial portion was left to circulate in the upper atmosphere.
Signal identifies the Cumaná cenote, a hidden sinkhole on the semi-abandoned Chunkanan farm, south of the city of Mérida.
Chicxulub, from Extinction of Dinosaurs to Renewal of Life on Earth
If we go back to the probabilistic facet of the impact, we will see that, over the millennia, several other meteorites of similar dimensions have fallen on other parts of the Earth: Chesaoeake Bay, in USA., Bavaria, among others.
But only a rare and exceptional terrestrial surface – laden with hydrocarbons – like the one around Chicxulub, could bring about an atmospheric change and a mass extinction like the one that took place.
On the suffocated and frigid Earth that the meteorite bequeathed, vegetation of significant size quickly succumbed. Without food, possibly frozen, followed the dinosaurs and many other species, it is believed that 75% of all animals or at least all terrestrial animals weighing more than 25kg, although mostly bird dinosaurs survived.
In the wake of this theory, different scientists discovered areas with tens of thousands of fossil fragments accumulated in a layer of sediment with just 10 cm.
Now, this concentration of victimized specimens buried in the same place would only be possible if caused by a fulminating and devastating event like the one that caused the Chicxulub crater.
That event annihilated the dinosaurs forever. At the same time, it shuffled the data of life on Earth. In such a way that, as the atmosphere normalized itself, the evolution of the species received an increment that led to the incredible diversity verified for some time now, and to the emergence, proliferation and supremacy of the human species.
Another entry into the underground world of the Yucatan Peninsula, this time in the state of Quintana Roo, near Playa del Carmen.
Also there, on the edge of the crater, in the geological legacies of the impact, as in those that mark the anthropological progress of Man, native men and women and outsiders live and celebrate the life that, believing in increasingly accepted theories, the catastrophe meteorite to them will have granted.
The post-impact tropical scenario of the Yucatan Peninsula
From Progreso, we zigzagged through the territory of the Yucatan, first through the Mexican state of the same name, then through the rest of the peninsula. Like thousands of visitors from other distant parts of the affected planet, we are dazzled by the cities that Mayas disseminated in this, which, after an incredible migratory epic, became their corner on Earth.
After Dzibilchaltún, we explore the Chichen Itza ceremonial complex and other places like the yellow city Izamal where vestiges and heritage Maia and Hispanic colonial live together class a class, street a street.
As is also common sense, we decompress from some tourist stress in several of the natural water spas that abound in these parts. In the absence of bathing conditions on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, we ventured into the depths of the Rio Secreto (an underground river).
We bathe on the perfect Caribbean beaches of Quintana Roo, the newest of the Peninsula states; also in Tulum which is crowned by one of the rare architectural ensembles Mayas erected almost over the Caribbean Sea.
Chunkanan hacienda building, in ruins, not because of the meteorite impact but because of the foreseeable effects of the economy.
On another tour of the Yucatan, we return to the interior of Mérida, discovering a farm darkens secular, once producing cacti used for clothing fiber and other uses.
A Legacy of the Meteorite, the Yucatecan cenotes
Hacienda Chunkanan dates back to the time of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz. As the resident guide tells us, Diaz offered it, in 1937, to peasants in the area so that they could take their livelihood from it. This happened until, in 2002, in a context in which the raw material had already been devalued, a hurricane called Isidoro devastated it.
Since then, the recovery of infrastructure and production continues to be delayed. For want of better, the peasants take advantage of what survived the cyclone and what the Chicxulub meteorite left them.
"Make yourself comfortable, we'll have ten minutes to travel." Jesus Pech Arjona, the driver of the carriage we took, instructs us. Faced with growing outsiders' interest in the Yucatan's historic farms and most impressive sinkholes, native workers made use of the property's basic rail system.
Semi-railway transport that, along the Chunkanan farm, takes visitors and bathers to the Cuzamá cenote.
Accordingly, a leisurely horse tows us and the small carriage along a corridor cleared of tropical vegetation. Ten minutes later, we disembarked. “See that sign at the bottom of the stairs? The entrance is through there!”
We went forward and peeked at the opening where the stairs were tucked away. Downstairs, lightly lit by the plunging sunlight, the cenote de Cuzamá, a deep and wide sink with a pool of translucent emerald water. We put on the bathing suits.
Bathers enjoy themselves in the lagoon of one of the numerous sinkholes spread across the Yucatan Peninsula.
We went down the stairs and joined four or five other bathers who were already enjoying the unusual lagoon. We splashed, swam, investigated the strange bottom of the flooded cave.
And we floated for minutes on end, just thinking about the irony of the same furious meteorite that annihilated the dinosaurs, having validated us. And to the delicious geological whim in which we felt renewed.
More tourist information about the Yucatan Peninsula on the website visit mexico
