On Denmark’s southeast coast, Stevns Klint is more than a dramatic white cliff above the Baltic-facing sea. Its rock layers preserve evidence of a turning point in Earth’s history: the impact associated with the end-Cretaceous mass extinction and the gradual return of marine life afterward. The UNESCO-listed property follows roughly 15 kilometres of fossil-rich coast. Visitors can read the landscape from accessible viewpoints and trails, but the meaning of the place becomes clearer when the geology is understood as a record rather than a backdrop.
UNESCO inscribed Stevns Klint in 2014 for its exceptional geological evidence. The cliff exposes a succession of chalk and limestone strata, including a thin boundary layer associated with the Chicxulub impact. The asteroid struck near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula; the Danish coast is not the impact site, but the sediments here preserve material linked to the event and a fossil sequence that shows which organisms disappeared, which survived, and how marine communities diversified afterward. Scientific sources round the event to about 65–66 million years ago, so an exact figure should not be mistaken for a date measured to the year.
