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Chinese scientists find evidence of most powerful asteroid strike humans ever experienced
- The impact crater uncovered in Heilongjiang may have been created by a blast hundreds of times bigger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb
- The asteroid was travelling far faster than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and the strike would have been ‘disastrous’ for anyone living in the area
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Scientists have found a crater in northeastern China that could be a remnant of the most powerful asteroid strike ever witnessed by modern humans.
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Many impact craters have been found around the world, but most of them were formed long before the emergence of homo sapiens 300,000 years ago.
But the “impossibly deep” crater discovered in Yilan county near Harbin in Heilongjiang is thought to have been formed about 49,000 years ago by an asteroid about 100 metres wide.
Although it was far smaller than the 10km asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, the scientists believe it was travelling at a much higher speed and came down vertically, creating a different type of impact crater than has previously been found.
The blast it caused was between 500 to 2,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima, according to their calculations, and would be comparable to some of the most powerful nuclear devices ever detonated.
The deadly heat and shock waves it generated were powerful enough to melt granite, turning it into glass, and would have devastated an area within a radius of tens of kilometres.
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