A team of academics from six Chinese universities and one in Austria has determined that a circular mountain crest in China’s Heilongjiang Province is an asteroid crater. The crew discusses their investigation of the crater and what they learned about it in a report published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
In 2019, a group of experts discovered what seemed to be a crater in the mountains of northeast China. Last year, the researchers examined fresh satellite photographs of the location and became even more certain that it was a crater. They then made plans to examine the crater up close. Along with examining the crater and its surroundings, the crew recovered a drill core from its center.
The core revealed that the crater floor was formed of lacustrine sediments from an ancient lake that subsequently became a swamp, with a 319-meter-thick layer of brecciated granite beneath, coupled with granite clasts and fragments—evidence of fractured bedrock caused by a highly intense collision. They also discovered melt products including vesicular glass and teardrop-shaped glass, which would have required tremendous temperatures to develop as they melted and then cooled in situ. They also discovered deformation characteristics in other nearby quartz. When the core’s traits were considered collectively, they offered strong evidence of an asteroid impact.
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The crater was also determined to be 1.85 kilometers across, albeit its southern rim has eroded, leaving the crater in a crescent form. They also discovered that the rim was roughly 152 meters tall at its highest point. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal in the vicinity and ancient lake silt revealed that the crater originated between 46,000 and 53,000 years ago, implying that the impact might have been observed by early modern humans or other relatives living nearby. The researchers were unable to establish the size of the asteroid that created the crater, but they propose that more study may assist generate estimations.
The crater is just the second impact crater discovered in China, and it joins the world’s 190 known craters. The new one is called Yilan after a neighboring city.
According to the Global Times, because a section of the Yilan crater’s southern rim is missing, the geological formation appears crescent-shaped from above. Such crescent-shaped impact craters are relatively unusual on Earth, according to Chen Ming, one of the article’s authors and a research fellow at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry. According to NASA, the Landsat-8 satellite captured an incredible photograph of the crater’s northern rim in October 2021, and experts are now investigating how and when the crater’s southern rim vanished.
The Meteor Crater in Arizona formerly held the record for the biggest impact crater less than 100,000 years old; it is around 49,000 to 50,000 years old and is 0.75 miles (1.2 km) in diameter. The Xiuyan crater, by comparison, is 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers) large, but its age is unclear, according to Forbes.
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