{"id":758948,"date":"2026-06-24T22:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T22:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/758948\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T22:53:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T22:53:11","slug":"earths-oldest-known-impact-crater-may-have-been-found-in-the-australian-outback-it-hit-earth-3-billion-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/758948\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s Oldest Known Impact Crater May Have Been Found in the Australian Outback. It Hit Earth 3 Billion Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Credit: Curtin University.<\/p>\n

Three billion years ago, before there were any animals, forests, and even before oxygen filled the air, something slammed into what is now Western Australia with enough force to scar the young planet. We can still see the signs of this violent impact today.<\/p>\n

The crater, if the new interpretation holds, lies in the Pilbara, a rust-red region famous for some of Earth\u2019s oldest rocks. There, at a place called the North Pole Dome, scientists say they have dated the oldest known impact crater on Earth \u2014 a structure left by an asteroid strike during the Archean eon, when early continents were still taking shape and life was mostly made of microbes. <\/p>\n

Using tiny minerals that acted like clocks inside damaged rock, researchers from Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia dated the event to about 3.02 billion years ago. <\/p>\n

That would make the North Pole Dome older than Yarrabubba, also in Western Australia, which had held the title of the oldest well-dated impact structure at about 2.2 billion years old. <\/p>\n

We don\u2019t yet know how large or powerful the impact was, but there are already many fascinating aspects to this discovery.<\/p>\n

The Crater\u2019s Mineral Timer<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pilbara landscape. Credit: Curtin University.<\/p>\n

The North Pole Dome lies about 1,600 kilometers north of Perth. It is part of the East Pilbara Terrane, a rare patch of crust that preserves rocks more than 3 billion years old.<\/p>\n

That impressive age is what makes the site valuable \u2014 and sometimes controversial. Last year, researchers reported a field of shatter cones there. These are distinctive, striated fractures that geologists generally regard as strong evidence of a meteorite impact. But the claim raised two separate questions: Were all the rocks truly part of the same impact structure? And if they were, when did the impact actually happen?<\/p>\n

Some scientists argued the crater could be much younger than first proposed, pointing to nearby rocks they linked to a formation about 2.77 billion years old. Others questioned whether later hot fluids moving through the Pilbara might have altered the minerals and confused the age.<\/p>\n

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The new study tries to answer that debate from inside the rocks themselves. Instead of relying only on the shape of the shatter cones, the researchers dated tiny minerals that appear to have been changed or newly grown when the rocks were shocked and heated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe impact left a \u2018mineral clock\u2019 behind,\u201d said Professor Chris Kirkland, the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cBy dating minerals that were remade or newly grown in the damaged rocks, we can now pin down when this extraordinary event happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Mineral Clock<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Kirkland was the lead author of the study. Credit: Curtin University.<\/p>\n

The most important mineral was zircon. Geologists often use zircon to date ancient rocks because it can hold uranium and lead in a stable crystal structure for billions of years.<\/p>\n

In the North Pole Dome samples, the researchers found zircon grains with unusual skeletal, branching shapes. These were not ordinary crystals from the original rock. The team interprets them as older zircons that were partly disrupted, recrystallized and in some places regrown during the heat and fluid movement that followed the impact.<\/p>\n

The team dated the clearest skeletal zircon signal to 3024 million years ago, with an uncertainty of just 7 million years. That is remarkably precise for rocks this ancient.<\/p>\n

Then they checked the clock against another mineral: apatite. This mineral grew as hot fluids moved through fractures in the shocked rock after the event. Its age came out nearly the same: about 3019 million years old, with a wider uncertainty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe agreement between two different mineral systems gives us confidence that we are seeing the signature of a single major event \u2014 a meteorite impact,\u201d Kirkland said.<\/p>\n

Why This Ancient Crater Matters<\/p>\n

\"Close<\/a>The age of \u2018little lightning bolts\u2019 of zircon embedded in the basalt rock were analysed by scientists. Photograph: Curtin University<\/p>\n

Meteorites are the\u00a0solar system\u2019s leftovers. They are material that weren\u2019t incorporated into forming planets or the debris left after\u00a0a space collision.\u00a0These leftovers can tell us a lot about Earth\u2019s formation<\/a> and the solar system more broadly.<\/p>\n

Meteorite impacts were much more common on the early Earth than they are today. Just looking at the battered surface of the Moon<\/a> gives a sense of the kind of onslaught our planet must have also experienced. You can\u2019t see it for yourself today because Earth constantly destroys its own evidence. Wind and water erode craters. Plate tectonics<\/a> buries, folds and recycles crust. Then heat and fluids alter minerals long after the original event.<\/p>\n

That makes Archean impact structures exceptionally hard to find, let alone date.<\/p>\n

Associate Professor Bruce Schaefer, a geochemist at Macquarie University who was not involved in the study, told The Guardian<\/a> that early Earth was continuously \u201cpummelled\u201d by meteorites.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be able to find evidence of those same impact events on Earth is really exciting. We know it must have happened, but to actually see it, and put your hands on it, is very significant,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Pilbara is one of the few places where such evidence might survive. Three billion years ago, Earth was not the familiar blue-green planet of today. It had little continental crust<\/a> compared with the modern world. The Sun was dimmer. The Moon was much closer and must have looked at least twice as big in the night\u2019s sky. Life, as far as we know, consisted of microbes, including organisms<\/a> that built stromatolites in shallow waters. <\/p>\n

Scientists hope the newly dated crater might help them understand how asteroid strikes shaped the crust, moved heat and fluids through rocks, and influenced the environments where early life<\/a> persisted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s very few places that are these deep time capsules<\/a> that let us peer into the formative processes on our planet,\u201d Kirkland told The Guardian. \u201cThat\u2019s why they\u2019re quite special.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Claim Still Under Fire<\/p>\n

The claim is still disputed. Alec Brenner, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, told ABC News<\/a> that shatter cones have been found in nearby rocks he considers to be about 2.77 billion years old, which would make the impact younger than the Curtin team proposes. He also argued that the new mineral ages may record a later episode of hot fluids moving through the rocks, rather than the impact itself. <\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors counter that their case does not rest on zircon alone. They point to the shocked quartz<\/a>, a matching apatite age, and the lack of a known regional heating event at that time. <\/p>\n

For now, North Pole Dome remains both a remarkable candidate and a contested one \u2014 a possible record of Earth\u2019s oldest known impact crater.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is quite enthralling, and the fact that you can look at the chemistry of these mineral grains to say something about an event that happened in a split second three billion years ago is really amazing,\u201d Kirkland told ABC News.<\/p>\n

The crater was described in a new study published in the journal Geology<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Curtin University. Three billion years ago, before there were any animals, forests, and even before oxygen filled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":758949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[27101,2840,49,48,99333,38720,66],"class_list":["post-758948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-asteroid","tag-australia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-crater","tag-meteorite","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/758949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}