Earth’s oldest meteorite crater found in Australia
It was a respectable tenure, but the world’s oldest known meteorite site is no longer western Australia’s 2.2 billion-year-old, 43-mile-wide Yarrabubba crater. Researchers at Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) say the new recordholder is located about 660 miles north in the country’s Pilbara region. And based on “unequivocal evidence” presented in their March 6 study published in Nature Communications, the 3.5 billion-year-old crater may help revise our understanding of some of the planet’s earliest eras, as well as the history of life on Earth. The Archean Eon (4–2.5 million years ago) is the second of Earth’s four major geologic eons, a time when the planet was mostly covered by oceans extending far deeper than those found today. Even so, its geology records can be accessed at excavation sites on modern continents like Australia. But researchers have long remained perplexed by what they found—or, rather, what they...