Cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula

The cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, are thousands of natural sinkholes formed in the peninsula's soft limestone bedrock, where slightly acidic rainwater and groundwater dissolved the rock over time to create underground caverns and passages whose ceilings eventually collapsed, exposing pools and caves of clear groundwater at the surface. The Maya regarded many cenotes as sacred, using them as water sources and as sites of ceremonial offerings, and the word "cenote" itself derives from a Yucatec Maya term for a well or cavern with water. A large concentration of cenotes traces a semicircular arc across the northern peninsula that closely follows the buried rim of the Chicxulub impact crater, the roughly 66-million-year-old scar left by the asteroid impact linked to the mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs, because the crater rim's fractured, weakened rock made that ring especially prone to later karst collapse. Many of the peninsula's cenotes connect underground into some of the longest known submerged cave systems in the world. This entity documents the cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula specifically as a geological formation, karst sinkholes formed by limestone dissolution and collapse, many aligned along the buried rim of the Chicxulub impact crater.