A team of geophysicists coordinated by Andrew Glikson, an expert in paleoclimate and Earth Sciences at the Faculty of Archeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, has found in the center of the island the trail left by a large asteroid that hit Earth. hundreds of millions of years ago .
According to these scientists, although the crater caused by the crash has already disappeared, the traces that it left behind, hidden in the earth’s crust, cover an area of 400 kilometers, which makes it the largest impact zone discovered. to date on our planet .
The discovery came during a geothermal energy investigation, while drilling was being carried out at a border point between the states of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
These revealed that the rocks of the crust, in which two deep domed depressions have appeared, were crystallized as a result of the enormous temperatures and pressures that this cosmic carambola originated .
From the data obtained, these researchers point out that moments before the cataclysm, a huge space rock split into two parts, each several kilometers long . However, no remains have appeared that allow the exact moment of impact to be determined with certainty.
For example, when 66 million years ago the fall of an asteroid precipitated the end of dinosaurs and many other species, an ash cloud originated whose trace can still be detected in the substrates of many areas of the world .
However, nothing similar has been found in the sediments of the rocks near the area studied by these scientists, which are at least 300 million years old , so Glikson and his collaborators suspect that the collision could have occurred millions of years earlier.
