Scientists have discovered the largest meteorite impact crater on Earth in 100,000 years in Heilongjiang Province, northeast China.
The discovery was made by Chinese scientists from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Austrian scientists from the University of Vienna.
The finding was published in the scientific journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science on July 29.
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The Yilan Crater is located 19 kilometers northwest of Yilan County, Heilongjiang Province, in the hilly southeastern margin of the Lesser Xing’an Range, one of China’s best-preserved forest areas.
The Yilan Crater is a circular geological structure with a diameter of 1.85 kilometres and a depth of 579 metres. Only the southern third of the crater rim is missing, while the rest of the rim is well preserved, with a maximum elevation of 150 metres above the current crater floor, according to the report.
According to Chen Ming, one of the article’s authors and a research fellow at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, the structure is a crescent-shaped meteorite impact crater, which is extremely rare on Earth.
The Yilan Crater is the largest meteorite impact crater on Earth in 100,000 years. The crater was discovered in the regional Paleozoic-Mesozoic granite complexes’ Early Jurassic granite, according to the article.
China has two impact structures that have been confirmed so far. The first is small, as the Xiuyan Crater in Liaoning Province, Northeast China, confirmed in 2010. It has a diameter of 1,800 metres and a depth of about 150 metres.