Nasa has revealed how an asteroid 13 times larger than a football pitch smashed into Earth to create a mountain range.
A striking image satellite image shows the impact site of an ancient asteroid in Australia's Northern Territory.
The image, captured on February 3, 2025, by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, shows the Amelia Creek Impact Structure.
The satellite view reveals a three-mile-long trough gouged into the landscape by an asteroid strike which is estimated to have been between 700 and 1,300 feet wide.
The image, captured on February 3, 2025, by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, shows the Amelia Creek Impact Structure
NASA
It struck Earth approximately 600 million years ago during the Ediacaran Period. During this time, land was largely barren and lifeless although shallow seas hosted an array of strange, mysterious creatures.
The collision occurred in what is now the Davenport Range, leaving its signature in the rocks even after the crater mostly eroded away.
Nasa explained that "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".
The impact created what Nasa has described as a "canoe-shaped trough" - measuring three miles long and 0.6 miles wide.
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Satellite measurements show the collision deformed rock layers up to 6.2 miles north and south of the impact crater.
Interestingly, areas to the east and west remained relatively unaffected by the impact.
Evidence of the impact at Amelia Creek has been discovered by geologists since the 1980s when they found fan-shaped fractures in quartz-based rocks that are now known to be "shatter cones" formed by powerful shock waves.
These rare features indicate the rocks experienced pressures between 290,000 and 4,350,000 pounds per square inch.
"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," Nasa explained.
Unlike the Amelia Creek event, steeper-angle asteroid impacts create different geological features.
Unlike the Amelia Creek event, steeper-angle asteroid impacts create different geological features (Stock)
GETTY
Nasa noted: "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 centre of the crater known as a central uplift."
Shallow-angle impacts typically cause less damage overall since the asteroid spends more time passing through Earth's atmosphere, burning off more mass during re-entry.
While the Amelia Creek impact likely had only regional effects, Nasa explained that two other asteroid strikes during the Ediacaran Period had far greater consequences, including global changes in climate and ocean chemistry.
They also caused the extinction of mysterious microfossils known as "acritarchs".
