Forever Young! Meteorite Crater Sheds Light on Earth’s Real Age – Report

After studying rocks and a dune at one of the world’s most stunning geological landmarks, Australia’s Wolfe Creek Crater, a team of researchers concluded that a meteorite hit the site 120,000 years ago – 180,000 years later than previously thought. This could cast doubt on the widely-accepted estimate that Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

The discovery that Australia’s Wolfe Creek Crater might be 120,000 years old, not 300,000 as was thought before, suggests that Earth could be much younger than believed, the German outlet Futurezone.de reports.

Examining craters like the one in the Australian desert helps to estimate how often meteorites similar to the 15-metre-wide iron mass that made the Wolfe Creek Crater strike planets and large objects in the Solar System, as well as to calculate their age. This goes for the Earth, Mercury, and the Moon, too.

The scar left on the surface of our planet in Australia is the second-largest crater on Earth where real fragments of a meteorite have been found, something which has helped scientists peek into a bygone era thousands of years ago.

To estimate the age of planets, like Earth and Mercury, scientists use a technique called “crater counting”. It counts such scars and compares them with estimates of how often other celestial bodies hit planets.

If a crater is younger than expected, the number of objects hitting Earth increases and the age of the planet decreases. It has been estimated that meteorites or similar celestial bodies strike our planet approximately every 180 years, including the latest strikes, one in a Siberian forest near the Tunguska River at the beginning of the 20th century and the other also in Siberia, near the city of Chelyabinsk, in 2013.

The outlet notes that the discovery in Australia, which has shown that earlier estimates were mistaken, could mean that other craters in our solar system that have been examined so far may be of a completely different age, potentially proving calculations of the age of the Earth and other planets wrong.

Sourse: sputniknews.com