The affects of a meteorite’s impact should not be underestimated. The discovery of the world’s oldest known crater caused by a meteorite could change how we think about the origins of life on Earth as well as how the planet was shaped.
A team of Curtin University researchers found the crater while investigating rock layers in the North Pole Dome in western Australia. There they found signs that a major meteorite impact affected the area 3.5 billion years ago, the team reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The discovery, which is over a billion years older than the previously known similarly created crater, could challenge previous assumptions about our planet’s ancient history.
