The Yarrabubba crater is an asteroid impact structure situated in the Mid-West Western Australia.
It was the eroded remnant of a former impact crater.
According to recent study, Australia’s Yarrabubba asteroid impact crater is oldest on earth (age of 2.229 billion years) and it may have been responsible for ending an ice age.
The Yarrabubba resisted reliable estimates of its age because of erosion and plate tectonics.
Other older asteroid crater is the Vredefort Dome in South Africa (2.023 billion years old) and Canada’s Sudbury Basin (1.850 billion years old).
These are the only other precisely dated Precambrian impact structures that are currently known.
The geological record shows the Earth had glacial ice before the time of the impact – but afterwards, ice disappeared for hundreds of millions of years.
Geologists date events using “isotopic clocks” in minerals like zircon and monazite.
These minerals contain small amounts of uranium, which gradually decays into lead at a known rate.