Sixty-six million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous, foraminifera-filled oceans teemed beneath skies that had never seen a mass extinction — until a 10-kilometer asteroid ended that world in seconds. This episode of Fault Lines asks whether the Chicxulub impact was purely a catastrophe, or whether it also structured what came next.

Ola and Amara examine a June 2026 study in Communications Earth and Environment finding the Chicxulub crater sustained a hydrothermal system for at least 8 million years, a January 2026 study in Geology documenting new plankton species appearing fewer than 2,000 years post-impact, and what both findings could mean for detecting life around impact craters on Mars. Listeners interested in deep time, evolutionary biology, or astrobiology will come away with a clearer picture of how destruction and recovery can be simultaneous rather than sequential.