TULUM: FROM THE WATER

"To understand the singular nature of the Yucatán Peninsula – the 73,600 square mile land mass separating the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico – one must go back 65 million years, to the end of the Cretaceous Period. It was then that geologists say a asteroid roughly six miles wide barreled out of deep space and hit the northern coast of the Yucatán with a force ten billion times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The impact of this massive hit is widely believed to have sparked worldwide climate disruption – volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, global firestorms, mega-tsunamis that hit what is now the southern coast of the United States – which in turn caused a global mass extinction that wiped out 75 percent of all living things on Earth, including the dinosaurs. It was a high-drama moment in the history of the planet. Earth was covered in a layer of dust that blocked the light of the sun and stopped photosynthesis."