The asteroid that killed the non-avian dinosaurs was obviously huge.

It measured about 10-15 km in diameter and left a crater twice as wide as Los Angeles that’s now submerged in the Gulf of Mexico. But what if I told you  there’s an even bigger crater from an even bigger asteroid that hit the Earth long before dinosaurs ever existed?

Allow me to introduce you to the Vredefort impact structure. It’s held the record for World’s Biggest Crater for 2 billion years. [Intro] I know, I know, the Vredefort impact structure doesn’t look much like a crater today. But 2 billion years ago, one of the biggest asteroids to ever strike Earth landed in South Africa, not too far from what is now Johannesburg.

The crater is estimated to be around 280 km wide. And I say “estimated” because the crater itself has eroded quite a bit over the years. All that degradation makes it hard to get  an exact measurement of the original size.

In order to make a crater that large, the asteroid would have had  to be about 25 km across and moving at around 15 km per second. Basically, a rock the size of a small  town traveling faster than a fighter jet. This was likely the largest impact the Earth had seen since its  earliest days in the Hadean Period, about 4 Billion years ago!

Back then, the planet was getting pelted  with giant rocks all the time because the solar system was still forming. It’s hard to even imagine the explosive force of the asteroid that hit South Africa. Rocks from the impact site have been found as far away as modern-day Russia!

Of course, our continents were all lumped together in a supercontinent 2 billion years ago, so those spots would have been more like 2,000 km apart as opposed to 10,000. But throwing a rock 2,000 km is still pretty impressive! Life was still in the early stages at the time, but cyanobacteria were new on the scene and had just begun photosynthesizing and pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.

And just because there weren’t any bonafide plants or animals yet doesn’t mean everything was fine for life the day of the impact. Given that this happened 2 billion years ago, we’ll never truly know exactly how microbial life was affected by such a huge space rock. But we do have information from other impacts that can help us get an idea of what may have happened.

For example, the asteroid that killed the non-avian  dinosaurs 66 million years ago kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that it plunged the world into a years-long winter when it essentially blocked out the sun. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic, meaning they need sunlight to make their food. So you can imagine how a years-long winter would have potentially set back life.

The impact wouldn’t have just affected our little microbe buddies or thrown rocks across a continent, though. It also left behind some  pretty interesting markers at the impact site itself. Like I mentioned earlier, the crater itself is mostly eroded, so the most obvious evidence of a space rock hitting our planet is hard to see.

But what about that dome in  the center of the crater? For a long time, scientists believed this was the result of volcanic activity. That is until they found shatter cones in the surrounding rocks These are, believe it or not, cone-shaped rocks that look shattered, with lots of cracks, lines, and fissures running through them.

Shatter cones form when the shock waves of the impact radiate through the surrounding rock that creates these interesting crack patterns with the pointy part of the cone pointing towards the impact site. It’s like an arrow directing you to a site of catastrophe! Shatter cones are widely accepted to be diagnostic features of dramatic impacts, such as nuclear explosions or asteroid strikes.

Which means that dome was  the result of the impact. But how on Earth, literally, would something hitting the planet cause something to protrude from the impact site? This SciShow video is supported by

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But you don’t need programming know-how to take advantage of JMP’s backend tech. You don’t even need to write out lines of code! JMP’s scripts and workflows can be saved from a graph or other output.

Then, you can automatically include them in your original data table, so you can reuse it as many times as you want. That also means that as you add data, update the dataset, and clean it up, your code will keep working. So JMP optimizes and  streamlines your data analysis without reinventing the wheel.

JMP offers a 30-day free  trial for anyone, anywhere. To see the benefits of visual  statistics for yourself, you can go to jmp.comscishow. When the asteroid hit, the impact would have produced such high temperatures and pressures, it allowed the rock to flow in a way rocks don’t usually flow.

The impact created a rebound  of the surrounding rock in the same way that a drop of water would create a rebound on a previously flat and calm surface of water. But that’s not even the coolest part! The rebounded rock brought a craton up closer to the surface of the Earth’s current crust.

Cratons are the roots of continents, and they’re made of some of the oldest continental crust that exists. And Thanks to erosion at the site, this craton has been exposed, allowing researchers to investigate the geology of the Earth 3 billion years ago! Now, I know I’ve mentioned the  erosion of the area several times.

The Vredefort impact site is less and less recognizable as a crater as time goes on. That’s because wind, water, and glaciers have been breaking down its original structure. Earth’s tendency to recycle its own rock isn’t helping preserve the site either.

The movement of tectonic plates causes Earth’s crust to dip below other crust, pushing it back in the mantle for it to be turned back into magma and recycled into new crust later on. This doesn’t happen on many other celestial bodies like Mars and the moon. And you may have noticed they have more craters than Earth.

For several reasons, craters just stick around longer on some planets. The Vredefort impact site won’t be around forever. But for now, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

You can even take a tour of the gorgeous landscape and all of its wacky, space-rock induced geological features. So go visit before it disappears! Then again, it took 2 billion years for  it to get to this point, so you’ve probably got some  time before it’s gone for good. [ OUTRO ]