Unique geologic formations found in Western Australia have led a team of researchers to conclude that an asteroid struck the area around 3.57 billion years ago which would make it the oldest such impact site known.

And it wouldn’t be even close. The second-oldest impact crater dates to around 2 billion years before our time.

Located in an area known as the Pilbara in the state of Western Australia, certain formations like “shatter cones” and “pillow basalts,” along with a rising dome shape in the middle of a vast expanse, have convinced Geologist and co-author Tim Johnson that their hypothesis is correct.

The Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago and was mostly water, but meteorite and asteroid impacts were uncommon before 2.5 billion years ago. This long stretch of largely empty history is known as the Archean Eon, and as one might imagine, little is known about the dynamics of Earth formation, terrestrial build-up, or impacts from this time.

ABC News Down Under reports that Johnson and his colleagues contentiously proposed three years ago that a 250,000 square kilometer region called the Pilbarra Craton was created by this impact, and a new paper on this theory includes physical examinations in an area which they believe was the epicenter of this event—one so large it would rival the extinction of the dinosaurs for aftermath.

Johnson reports the crater can be seen today only in a 35-mile wide dome that marks exactly where the asteroid impacted.

“So, when you form a really big crater, the middle bit forces its way back to the surface so you get a dome structure,” he said.

“We think those [sort of] domes are possibly the likely places where life would have taken a foothold in the Pilbara and elsewhere.”

As Johnson suggests, part of the work he and his team are doing at the site is laying out a hypothesis for how a massive impact event like this may have been the genesis of life. But before that, he and his team had to present multiple lines of evidence that point to the Pilbara dome structure being the site of a meteorite impact.

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Part of that evidence is the presence of shatter cones, a formation that appears like an upside down badminton shuttlecock.

“So, upward facing cones with delicate feathery-like features,” Johnson said. “The only way you can form those in natural rocks is from a large meteorite impact.”

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Another formation found that may hint that the site’s archaic history are pillow basalts, which could have formed from lava flowing under water after an impact event, overlying the shatter cones in the Pilbara, and offering part of the precise date of 3.57 billion years ago.

Other scientists aren’t convinced—at least that the discovery changes anything about our understanding of Earth’s evolution and the influence of impacts on Earth’s structure. Johnson and his team will use a variety of tools to examine the components of the shatter cones to hone their argument.

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