Around 600 million years ago, Earth was home to strange, soft-bodied sea creatures, but a powerful asteroid impact in what is now northern Australia may have wiped them out.
This collision left behind a long, shallow crater and sent shock waves rippling through the rock, creating rare geological features called shatter cones. Though the full extent of the destruction remains uncertain, geologists believe other, larger asteroid impacts during this period may have triggered global changes in climate and ocean chemistry, perhaps even playing a role in one of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions.
A Strange and Ancient World
Around 600 million years ago, during the Ediacaran Period, Earth looked vastly different from today. The land, having recently emerged from a global freeze, was mostly barren and lifeless. However, the oceans teemed with strange, soft-bodied creatures. Among them were worm-like organisms with crescent-shaped heads, spiral-shaped mounds with an unusual three-part symmetry, and towering, fern-like fronds.
A Devastating Impact in Ancient Australia
These ancient life forms may have been wiped out when an asteroid, estimated to be 200 to 400 meters (700 to 1,300 feet) wide, streaked across the sky and crashed into land or shallow waters near what is now the Davenport Range in northern Australia. Though the original crater has largely eroded, evidence of the impact remains etched in the region’s folded sedimentary and volcanic rock layers.
On February 3, 2025, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of the impact site, an area called the Amelia Creek impact structure. The collision gouged a canoe-shaped trough about 1 kilometer wide and 5 kilometers long. An analysis of satellite observations shows deformation in the regional rock strata extends about 10 kilometers north and south of the impact crater, with minimal deformation to the east and west.
The long, narrow shape of the crater and the pattern of regional deformation are signs that the asteroid struck at an extremely oblique (shallow) angle. A steeper-angle asteroid impact, such as the one that doomed the dinosaurs, would have left a deeper, more symmetrical crater and created an elevated feature in the center of the crater known as a central uplift.
The Clues Hidden in Rock
Other telltale clues of an impact event at Amelia Creek are buried in nearby quartzite rock strata. Starting in the 1980s, geologists discovered fan-shaped fractures, later identified as shatter cones, rare geologic features that only form when impact events send shock waves barreling through rock. All of the area’s shatter cones are distributed in a crescent-like pattern mainly to the south of the crater, another sign that the asteroid struck at a shallow angle.
The Impact’s Mysterious Consequences
The amount of damage caused by the impact is unclear, but asteroids that hit Earth at shallow angles are thought to cause less damage than those that strike at steep angles. The shallow angle means the rocky body passes through Earth’s atmosphere for a longer distance, burning off more mass and often breaking into smaller pieces before impact.
While the most severe damage was probably localized near the site of the collision, geologists have assembled evidence suggesting that two other larger impacts during the Ediacaran may have had much greater and even global effects, possibly contributing to the extinction of an enigmatic class of creatures called acritarchs and helping cause global changes in ocean chemistry and climate.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and using topographic data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
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7 Comments
And what of that asteroid that hit the Earth and calved off the Moon? Or what if the 5th planet had formed (or hadn’t broken up) and there was no asteroid belt?
We can play what if games forever but of what value is this? What is, is.
Always fascinated by the information in the reading. It’s a pity there are those out there who question or mock the findings presented. When will people realize Science is not Dogma?
It seems to me that your last two sentences are contradictory. Skepticism is the essence of real science. Even after more than 100 years, physicists and astronomers are still devising experiments to test Einstein’s theory of relativity.
These fantastic stories presented as truth.
So many contradictory findings, studies, discoveries that you cannot get a consistent story from one person to the next much less from one year to the next.
“We looked at the rocks and can now tell you what happened 600million years ago”
LMAO and people believe this stuff.
Always fascinated by the information in the reading. It’s a pity there are those out there who question or mock the findings presented. When will people realize Science is not Dogma?
Why are you quoting what Charles Ciullo wrote? Are you one and the same? What is the purpose of making the same statement with two different names? Are you trying to tilt the playing field?
Geologists may not have a perfect or even continuous explanation for the past, but at least they don’t have to shrug their shoulders and say that they don’t have a clue, unlike someone who engages in unproductive activities like batting a little rubber ball back and forth over a net.