The Mayas for beginners chapter 2

The crater of chicxulub and the cenotes

It was 1978 when the Geofisicist Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo where working for the mexican oil company PEMEX, when they found one of the most important discoveries of all times, a gigantic crater of 200 miles (300km) diameter in the gulf of Mexico, in front of the coast of a fishermen village named CHICXULUB (the Devil's flea in maya language) only about 4 miles east from the Port of Progreso, in the mexican state of Yucatan.

With the help of the canadian geologist Alan Hildebrand, Camargo and Penfield got samples of the border of the crater with high concentration of Iridium, a rare mineral in earth but really abundant in asteroids, wich confirmed the crater was caused by the impact of an asteroid no less than 6 miles (10km) diameter, 65 million years ago. 

It is confirmed today than the asteroid of Chicxulub killed most species of dinosaurs 65 millionn years ago, but is still a matter of debate if that was the only impact or there where others around the world. Is estimated than the impact in  Chicxulub was 2 million times  strongger than the most powerful bomb ever detonated by human beens (the Zar Bomb)

In 1996, a team of scientist from California, commanded by Adriana Ocampo, Kevin Pope and Charles Dullin, studied satelite pictures and discovered a ring of cenotes making the inland side of the crater.

See video about the Crater of Chicxulub

The Peninsula of Yucatan is a flat land with no rivers or lakes, the only kind of water runs under 90 feet of limestone in a very complex web of underground rivers. When the rain water filters through the ground, erotes the rock , and makes at the roof of the caves giant peaks of rock called estalactites, and at the bottom some others called estalacmites, thousands of years later, the roof gets fragil, hollow and breakable until one day it collapse, making a big hole at the roof or wich is the same, a hole in the ground level, the nearest well to the chicxulub impact is the one located at the mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltun.

The mayas found those natural wells and called them  CHE'EN and eventually DZONOT. At the year 455 ad a group of mayas found 14 of those natural wells in 25 square km. and decided to live near by , calling the place, The Mouth of the Well for the Magicians of the Water, CHI/ CHEN/ ITZ/ HA, in spanish, Chichen Itza. When the Spaniards arrived to the peninsula of Yucatan, in 1521 they  heard the mayas calling the wells DZONOT, but they couldn't pronounce it,  so they end up calling them CENOTES. Is easy to imagine then, that if one find a little mayan village in the middle of nowhere, there is water there. The cenotes where for the mayas, the access to the infraworld, a place to conect with their gods and ancestors and an endless source of clean and therefore, drinkable water.

David Alejandro Echeverria Garcia
daechegar@yahoo.es
david.echeverria@mayanencounter.com
www.mayanencounter.com