Age Of Earth's Oldest Asteroid Strike Wrong By Half A Billion Years
Scientists have pushed Earth’s oldest known impact crater back to about 3 billion years, and in doing so, they have re-sharpened the debate over how meteorite strikes shaped the planet’s early history. Said crater, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, even with its revised timeline, still predates the next-oldest recognized impact structure in the region by roughly 800 million years.
For years, the age of the North Pole Dome in the remote Australian outback has been argued over. One study last year called for a far older age of 3.47 billion years (around the same time as the infamous NWA 12593 meteorite), but later work challenged that estimate and said the impact could not be older than 2.7 billion years. The newest analysis, published in the Geology journal, used mineral dating on zircon, apatite, calcite and muscovite from shatter cones and a shocked quartz vein to pin the event to...
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