Crater is 200 million years older than the previously oldest known crater.
The Earth is pocked with roughly 190 major meteor craters, yet scientists only know the age of just a few. Recently, A NASA scientist analyzed the age of the Yarrabubba meteor crater in Australia and found it to be 2.229 billion years old, making it now the oldest crater currently known.
“It’s 200 million years older than the previously oldest known crater, which was the over 200-kilometer Vredefort Dome crater in South Africa,” said Timmons Erickson, a research scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division, or ARES, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Erickson made the discovery leading a team that included Christopher Kirkland, Nicholas Timms and Aaron Cavosie from Curtin University in Australia and Thomas Davison from Imperial College London. The researchers recently announced their finding in the journal Nature Communications.
Scientists are interested in dating the age of meteor strikes because these impacts likely played significant roles in the environmental development and history of our planet. For example, many people are familiar with the theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by a climatic chain reaction, triggered by a meteor that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago.
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