Satellite Spots Massive Asteroid Impact Crater in China

In 2019, researchers first described a 1.15-mile-wide crater in a mountain vary in northeast China; late last 12 months, a NASA satellite tv for pc imaged the crater from house, giving a broad new view the affect’s aftermath.

The crater is in Heilongjiang Province’s Yilan County. According to the researchers who described it in 2019, it’s the second confirmed affect construction in China. The website has lengthy been recognized to locals, who name it “Quanshan,” or “circular mountain ridge,” in line with a NASA Earth Observatory release.

The southern rim of the crater has eroded, so from above the affect website appears to be like extra like a crescent. The rim is almost 500 ft tall at its highest factors, the researchers reported, and is barely wider than China’s beforehand confirmed affect strucgture, Xiuyan, which is 1.12 miles throughout.

This picture was captured by the Operational Land Imager aboard Landsat 8 on October 8, 2021. Farmland is seen to the southeast, and on the fitting aspect of the picture is the Balan River.

Last 12 months, a unique workforce of researchers determined that the crater fashioned between 46,000 and 53,000 years in the past, making it the biggest crater lower than 100,000 years outdated. They found out that the crater was fashioned by an asteroid by drilling practically 1,500 ft into its middle, the place they discovered melted stone, shocked quartz, and glass within the historic sediments—proof of a high-temperature blast. Radiocarbon relationship of the shocked sediments gave researchers the surprisingly current date.

The dimension of the asteroid that made the crater is unsure, however it wouldn’t have been practically as massive as the large despair it left. For reference, Arizona’s Meteor Crater is 0.75 miles extensive, however NASA scientists imagine the asteroid that created it was simply 150 ft throughout.

The Yilan asteroid’s violent affect occurred within the Late Pleistocene (which lasted from 126,000 years in the past to 11,700 years in the past), and it could’ve been witnessed by fashionable people and our kinfolk within the area.

Coincidentally, the Dragon Man fossil described final 12 months was present in Harbin, China, the biggest metropolis in Heilongjiang Province. The asteroid that created Yalin crater is thrice youthful than that fossil; maybe Dragon Man’s descendants witnessed the affect, which occurred simply 135 miles from the place the fossil was stored.

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