What is the largest impact crater on Earth?
The Vredefort crater
The Vredefort crater /ˈfrɪərdəfɔːrt/ is the largest verified impact crater on Earth. It was 160–300 km (99–186 mi) across when it was formed; what remains of it is in the present-day Free State province of South Africa. It is named after the town of Vredefort, which is near its centre.
Is there a crater under Antarctica?
Evidence of 2,000km-wide asteroid impact crater in Antarctica discovered. The discovery indicated a so-called low-altitude meteoritic touchdown event – where a jet of melted and vaporised material from an asteroid at least 100 metres in size reached the surface at high velocity.
What is Wilkes Land Antarctica?
Wilkes Land is a large district of land in eastern Antarctica, formally claimed by Australia as part of the Australian Antarctic Territory, though the validity of this claim has been placed for the period of the operation of the Antarctic Treaty, to which Australia is a signatory.
What is Shiva impact?
It is a crater submerged in the Arabian Sea, to the west of Mumbai, around the Bombay High. According to Dr Chatterjee’s team, it was made by the impact of an asteroid, about 40 km in diameter, 65 million years ago, around the same time as Chicxulub crater was formed 15,000 km away in Mexico.
How big was meteor that killed dinosaurs?
Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) and produced a crater in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula that spans 90 miles (145 kilometers).
Is there life in Lake Vostok?
The embayment contained the most biological activity with the largest number of species Identified. After two years of computer analysis, the final results reveal that Vostok Lake contains a diverse set of microbes, as well as some multicellular organisms.
What impact have meteorites had on earth?
Meteorite Impacts in History A very large asteroid impact 65 million years ago is thought to have contributed to the extinction of about 75 percent of marine and land animals on Earth at the time, including the dinosaurs. It created the 180-mile-wide (300-kilometer-wide) Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatan Peninsula.
What continent is Wilkes Land in?
Antarctica
Wilkes Land, region in Antarctica, bordering the Indian Ocean between Queen Mary and George V coasts (100°–142°20′ E). The region is almost entirely covered by the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), averaging from 6,000 to 9,500 feet (1,800 to 2,900 metres) above sea level.
Is Antarctica an Australian territory?
The Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) covers nearly 5.9 million square kilometres. That’s about 42% of Antarctica. The area is nearly 80% of the size of Australia itself.
What killed the dinosaurs?
Asteroid Dust Found in Crater Closes Case of Dinosaur Extinction. The asteroid impact led to the extinction of 75% of life, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
What is the largest asteroid to hit Earth?
The Chelyabinsk meteor
The Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to have caused over $30 million in damage. It is the largest recorded object to have encountered the Earth since the 1908 Tunguska event. The meteor is estimated to have an initial diameter of 17–20 metres and a mass of roughly 10,000 tonnes.
How big is the crater in Wilkes Land?
That combination suggested to them that the feature may mark the site of a 480 km (300 mi) wide impact crater buried beneath the ice and more than 2.5 times larger than the 180 km (110 mi) Chicxulub crater . Due to the site’s location beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, there are no direct samples to test for evidence of impact.
Who was the first person to propose the Wilkes impact crater?
A giant impact crater beneath the Wilkes Land ice sheet was first proposed by Schmidt ( 1962 ); the hypothesis was developed by Weihaupt ( 1976 ), challenged by Bentley ( 1979) and supported by Weihaupt ( 2010 ).
How is the Wilkes Land crater related to the Siberian Traps?
Plate reconstructions for the Permian–Triassic boundary place the putative crater directly antipodal to the Siberian Traps, and Frese et al. (2009) use the controversial theory that impacts can trigger massive volcanism at their antipodes to bolster their impact crater theory.
Is there a giant impact crater in Antarctica?
The definitive existence of a giant impact crater, two times larger than the Chixulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, from an extraterrestrial origin, 1.6 km beneath Wilkes Land, East Antarctica, remain controversial.