Thanks Utilizer, nice find!
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Posted on 03/23/2015 5:53:18 PM PDT by Utilizer
A 400 kilometre-wide impact zone from a huge meteorite that broke in two moments before it slammed into the Earth has been found in Central Australia.
The crater from the impact millions of years ago has long disappeared. But a team of geophysicists has found the twin scars of the impacts – the largest impact zone ever found on Earth – hidden deep in the earth’s crust.
Lead researcher Dr Andrew Glikson from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology said the impact zone was discovered during drilling as part of geothermal research, in an area near the borders of South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.
“The two asteroids must each have been over 10 kilometres across – it would have been curtains for many life species on the planet at the time,” said Dr Glikson.
The revelation of such ancient violent impacts may lead to new theories about the Earth’s history.
“Large impacts like these may have had a far more significant role in the Earth’s evolution than previously thought,” Dr Glikson said.
The exact date of the impacts remains unclear. The surrounding rocks are 300 to 600 million years old, but evidence of the type left by other meteorite strikes is lacking.
(Excerpt) Read more at anu.edu.au ...
Ping.
The earth must have rung like a bell after that.............
My thanks. I had not seen that pic before and it is quite informative.
It was certainly an extinction-level event, but according to the article they still can’t find any indications of it.
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It wiped out all the non poisonous critters in Australia.
My dad always said that hemorrhoids should have been called asteroids.
“Central Australia” is a huge, vast area, but there are towns and stations even in all that isolation. I would appreciate the name of the nearest town so I can find it on my maps of Australia. “Central Australia” is like saying the US “Midwest.” Or, more appropriate, “the Sahara.” Cheers from South Central Texas
The two impact areas are located in the East Warburton Basin and the WestWarburton Basin, and a quick search does not reveal any large towns nearby -which is usually the case in the never-never.
You might do best by looking around the area of the Strzelecki Regional Reserve, right where the borders of the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales come together. Great lot of area there so you might have a bit of looking to do before you can locate them.
Sturt National Park is in the general area as well.
You should be able to orient yourelf quite well that way, having a useful scale.
This stirred up something that’s bothered me for a while:
There is a classic sci-fi story about an Earth defense base in Australia. It involved humans in a technical symbiosis with cats fighting off alien invaders.
The climax was the human partner’s cat’s death.
The title was “Mother _____’s cats” or something like that.
Anyone remember more?
If you don’t mind doing a bit of reading, download the following pdf which has more info about the general area and a few more maps:
http://www.santos.com/library/aridzone.pdf
Is that asteroid hole where that horrible movie “Wolf Creek” was shot?
Honestly, I’ve no blippin’ idea.
Here is a wonderful link with over 500 graphs, illustrations, photos, etc. of extinction events, asteroids, fossils, extinct creatures restored, etc. If you look at the first line, there is a great graph in blue which shows that while there have been about 5 or 6 major extinction events since the Cambrian, several had clusters of ongoing events both before and after.
The Devonian event at 360 mya, or the Ordovician-Silurian event of 400 mya, might fit the bill. I hope they can date them more closely soon. I can’t wait to go back and study those charts some more.
I believe you have asked that question before. You might get a better response if you start a Vanity thread with the question so it gets more eyes on it to begin with.
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