Earth’s Oldest Crater Discovered In Australia – And It’s a Billion Years Older Than We Thought

Do you know the location of Earth’s oldest impact crater, and how old and large it is? Geologists have discovered updated answers to these questions, displacing the Yarrabubba crater, which previously held the record for years.

A Newly Discovered Impact Crater Might Be the Oldest Crater on Earth

In 2003, geologists discovered Yarrabubba, a 70km wide crater in Western Australia and at the time it was estimated to be about 2.229 billion years old. This discovery shaped human knowledge of what the Earth’s oldest impact crater was, its age, and its size.

However, a discovery by Chris Kirkland of Curtin University in Australia is changing history as we know it. This discovery unfolds an older and bigger impact crater near the Pilbara town of Marble Bar in Australia that dethrones Yarrabubba of its world record.

Detailed analysis of the rock layers around the region of this discovery reveals that the new record-breaking crater is at least 100km wide. This dwarfs the size of Yarrabubba, revealing that much larger space rocks have made their way into the Earth, leaving their marks with us. The study was published on 5 March in Nature.

Regarding its age, this newly discovered crater is estimated to be over 3.47 billion years old. According to Kirkland’s research, the space rock that left this print on the earth was hurtling towards the planet at around 36,000 kilometres per hour.

Kirkland claims that this crater might have been an early factor influencing the spark of life on Earth. The space rock that left this crater after crashing on Earth might have hot mineral-rich pools of water that might have been home to early forms of life.

Doubts Surrounding This Discovery

Despite the fact that work on this discovery and investigation of this impact crater kicked off in 2021, giving the team ample time to get their facts right, some doubt the research work. The initial findings of evidence of a crater in the North Pole Dome area in Australia were made a few hours after Kirkland’s team got to the area.

With this evidence, Kirkland’s team were able to leave the area and evaluate their findings. According to Kirkland, some of his team’s findings include well-preserved shattered cones, hut-like structures, badminton shuttlecock-shaped rocks, etc.

Last year the team returned to the location and the Geological Survey of Western Australia was able to date the rocks to be 3.47 billion years old. Regardless of the seemingly solid findings, Marc Norman, an Emeritus Fellow in the Research School of Earth Sciences of the Australian National University, doubts the research.

Norman says that while the research is interesting, it fails to “advance our understanding of how impacts might have influenced how Earth formed and evolved over billions of years.” Others like Norman are also out there, and they question this new research finding of what seems to be Earth’s new oldest impact crater.