Scientists are saying that they have discovered the signs of a ravaging meteorite which has hit the surface of Australia about 300 million years ago.
The surface of the crater located in Warburton Basin in central Australia, has vanished long ago, but Australian National University Scientist have said that after drilling more than a mile deep into the Earth, they have discovered that the diameter of the crater is about 250 mile.
According to researchers, the meteorite had broken into 2 halves before it hit the Earth all those years back.
The drill core contained traces of rock which had been transformed to by extreme temperature and pressure, therefore a closer look was necessary.
A team of geophysicists around lead researcher Dr. Andrew Glikson of ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology used a 3D microscopy along with a transmission electro-microscopy for measuring the structures in the quartz and has identified Miller indices in the samples.
Miller indices refer to exclusive crystallographic orientations of planar deformation features (PDF) in quartz, the formation of which takes places under shock pressures more than 8GPa.
“We found shock pressures that were larger than 10-20 GPa. This means by definition that this shock metamorphism could not occur within the earth, e.g. from volcanoes or earthquakes. It had to be induced by an asteroid,” said Dr. Glikson.
“The two asteroids must each have been over 10km across - it would have been curtains for many life species on the planet at the time.”
“Large impacts like these may have had a far more significant role in the Earth’s evolution than previously thought,” Dr Glikson said.
The impact had the possibility of sending huge clouds of ash and dust into the atmosphere, bringing changes to the Earth’s temperature and probably causing the extinction of several kinds of species.
Regardless of the size of the hit, the scientists still have not been able to connect the dots of it with a particular period of extinction on Earth.
“It’s a mystery - we can’t find an extinction event that matches these collisions,” Dr Glikson said.
“I have a suspicion the impact could be older than 300 million years.”
The most distressing meteorite to hit the face of the Earth, according to the knowledge of scientists came around 66 million years back leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
