{"id":141996,"date":"2022-07-11T07:04:04","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T12:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/meteorite-impact-two-billion-years-ago-may-have-ended-an-ice-age"},"modified":"2022-07-11T07:04:04","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T12:04:04","slug":"meteorite-impact-two-billion-years-ago-may-have-ended-an-ice-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/meteorite-impact-two-billion-years-ago-may-have-ended-an-ice-age","title":{"rendered":"Meteorite impact two billion years ago may have ended an ice age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/meteorite-impact-two-billion-years-ago-may-have-ended-an-ice-age2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Australian crater Yarrabubba is the oldest known on Earth, according to new measurements, and it might be linked to the end of a \u201cSnowball Earth\u201d ice age.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Yarrabubba crater in western Australia stretches roughly 40 miles across. And since its discovery in 2003, scientists have speculated it\u2019s one of Earth\u2019s oldest meteorite craters. Now, a team of researchers has pinned down the crater\u2019s precise age, revealing it\u2019s about 2.23 billion years old. This officially makes Yarrabubba the oldest known crater on Earth, surpassing the age of <a class=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/earthobservatory.nasa.gov\/images\/92689\/vredefort-crater\">Vredefort crater<\/a> by about 200 million years.<\/p>\n<p>The meteorite impact that created Yarrabubba would have slammed into our planet at the end of one of our \u201cSnowball Earth\u201d ice ages, the researchers say, and it\u2019s possible that the impact heated up our planet and ended that icy episode in Earth\u2019s history.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers presented the findings in a paper published Jan. 21 in <a class=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-019-13985-7\"> <em>Nature Communications<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Australian crater Yarrabubba is the oldest known on Earth, according to new measurements, and it might be linked to the end of a \u201cSnowball Earth\u201d ice age. Yarrabubba crater in western Australia stretches roughly 40 miles across. And since its discovery in 2003, scientists have speculated it\u2019s one of Earth\u2019s oldest meteorite craters. Now, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}