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Yarrabubba crater
January 27 , 2020
1637 days
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- 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.
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