Giant Impact Crater Found In Australia

An anonymous reader writes "One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the South Australian outback by geothermal researchers. It may explain one of the many extinction events in the past 600 million years, and may contain rare and exotic minerals. The crater is said to have been 'produced by an asteroid six to 12 km across' — which is really big!"

Comments

discovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... where was it hiding?

Re:discovered?

[LingNoi]

Obviously not in the article.. not even one damn picture of it..

Re:Meh, I've seen bigger...

[gstoddart]

Seriously, a 80-160 km crater is not giant. Big, okay, they don't form every day, but there are much bigger craters than that. Like Menrva on Titan.

Nobody is saying this is the biggest crater ever created in the solar system.

But, they are saying that anything which creates a crater of that size on Earth is going to make one hell of a mess. From TFA:

"Nothing within a few hundred kilometres of the blast would have survived, but more importantly the climate of the entire Earth would have been changed. It would have filled the atmosphere with so much dust that sunlight would be obscured, possibly for several years, killing a large amount of plant life on which animals obviously rely, thereby causing a global kill event - although perhaps not on the scale of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

"If such an impact occurred now, the majority of the human population would be wiped out, through the consequent reduction in our ability to grow crops," he added.

In this case, "big" is relative. And, me, I'd call this pretty damned big in terms of what it actually signifies.

You can niggle over the fact that Titan has a bigger crater if you like. Me, I wouldn't want to be around when something like this happened. Have you gotten so jaded with this stuff as to lose track of what it actually means?