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Long ago, a rock 6 miles across crashed into Earth and left a hole 12 miles deep and 240 miles wide.
El Reg reports
Australia has been identified as home to the largest asteroid impact crater ever found, more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico often attributed with wiping out the dinosaurs.
The new find in the Warburton Basin in Central Australia is a stunning 400 km-wide impact zone from a huge asteroid that broke into two pieces just before it hit. So big was the impact that it fractured the Earth's crust to a depth of around 20 km, according to a paper published in Tectonophysics .
The Australian National University says it's the largest impact crater ever discovered--the Chicxulub crater measures 180 km across. (108 mi) [... however, the] exact date of the impact remains unclear[...]
[Andrew Gilkson, PhD of the Australian National University says] "we can't find an extinction event that matches these collisions. I have a suspicion the impact could be older than 300 million years".
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday March 25 2015, @03:44AM
I wonder why they say that they "can't find an extinction event that matches these collisions". Is it just because they can't pin down the date of the impact event to a range smaller than nearly the entire Paleozoic era? At 300 million to 600 million years ago, that goes from the late Ediacaran period of Precambrian time, all the way to the end of the Carboniferous. That's four of the five periods of the Paleozoic era, quite a lot of geological time. There are thought to have been at least three major mass extinctions within that time period: Cambrian-Ordovician (488 Mya), Ordovician-Silurian (447 Mya, the second most severe mass extinction), and Late Devonian (375 Mya). The Permian-Triassic extinction event, the worst mass extinction the earth has ever seen, is just beyond that time period (252 Mya). I imagine that the impact might be responsible for or at the very least contributed to one of these events.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Funny) by sigma on Wednesday March 25 2015, @06:04AM
I wonder why they say that they "can't find an extinction event that matches these collisions".
The crater's near the border of South Australia and Queensland. If the impact happened in SA, the evidence has probably been welded into empty beer kegs and stored in a vault somewhere. If it was in QLD, they probably haven't realised it yet, so give them a few more eons to catch up.