Earth's oldest known meteor crash site found in Australian Outback

Despite Earth's long history of getting smacked by space rocks, evidence of those collisions can be very hard to find; even the largest impact craters vanish over time due to erosion and tectonic activity, taking the best reminders of Earth's past with them. Now, however, researchers in Western Australia believe they've found the single oldest impact crater ever detected, dating to roughly 2.2 billion years ago.

In a new study published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers studied a 45-mile-wide (70 kilometers) impact site in the Australian Outback known as Yarrabubba. Today, all that's visible of the once-enormous crater is a small red hill at the area's center, known as Barlangi Hill. According to the researchers, the minerals inside that hill hold valuable information about the impact's age.

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(Image: Google Earth/ The Conversation)

Researchers drew the estimated shape of the vanished Yarrabubba impact crater over this Google Earth image of Western Australia. The structure may be part of the oldest known impact crater on Earth.

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