Enormous Crater Three Times Bigger Than the Grand Canyon Discovered in the United States

These craters can come in all shapes and sizes. Often, average Americans don’t even realize some of these enormous craters even exist — and can be found in their local areas. In fact, the largest crater ever discovered in the U.S. is about three times larger than the Grand Canyon.

These so-called impact events occur over millions of years. As there can be different types of sizes of these space rocks, the types of craters they leave behind can vary.

Scientists conduct many tests to fully understand if an impression on the Earth is from a meteor or asteroid — or if it’s from something else.

To accurately decide what formed these craters, scientists conduct testing at impact crater sites to see if they can find rock samples to study. They also look at circular depression images to further uncover information about these sites.

In some cases, scientists have even stumbled upon impact craters without even realizing it, only learning the truth after some studies have been conducted on the region.

For example, Earth is a relatively newer planet than the Moon and Mercury, which have many noticeable craters. The Moon even has about 9,137 craters on its surface that scientists have recognized. More could be found in the future.

These crater sites vary greatly in size and range. Diameters can be as small as 0.1 kilometers to as large as 90 kilometers.

Poag was in the region for an offshore drilling project when this stunning discovery was made. The crater site was hidden beneath the Chesapeake Bay’s floor for centuries before Poag finally realized the truth of the Bay.

This crater site has a diameter of 53 miles. This makes it larger than the Grand Canyon, which has a widest point of about 18 miles.

This 3 km long bolide traveled at 144,000 miles per hour before colliding with the planet, leaving a 1.3 km deep impact crater behind.

In our present day, a large reservoir filled with water 1.5 times saltier than seawater lies in the impact spot. Because this water is incredibly salty, it cannot be used for many purposes, such as for drinking water.

Researchers believe that, after this collision, the York and James rivers changed their flow to head northeast to the crater.

According to the Planetary and Space Science Centre (PASSC), there is a total of 190 impact crater structures confirmed found on the Earth.

The meteor that created the Barringer Crater was estimated to weigh 300,000 tons and impacted the Earth with a force of two and a half million tons of TNT.

The Australian Parks and Wildlife Service estimates the crater was created 300,000 years ago. This crater has been the source of many stories and myths among indigenous communities.

For example, The Kaali crater in Estonia is thought by scholars to have been used for animal sacrifice in pre-Christian times.

This crater is the only known impact crater to have formed in these conditions and was originally misclassified as a volcanic crater because of its appearance until further research was done.

Typically volcanic craters are differentiated from impact craters because impact craters raise the rims and floors around them while volcanic craters just depress the land.

Gosses Bluff is one example of this, which scientists believe was formed around 142 million years ago when a huge meteor created the 14-mile-long crater.

The crater eventually became part of a National Park in Canada and is considered to be a relatively young crater given the typical timescale of crater formations on the Earth.

A research study on the age of these craters from 2004 suggests that they may be 250 years old or younger.

The crater is thought to have formed when the Earth was a ball of ice. Researchers speculate that the Earth has been completely covered in ice at least three times throughout its history.

Since the invention of aerial travel and satellites, many impact craters on the surface have been identified but researchers continue to find evidence of ones buried underground.

“While interpreting the data, I (came) across this very unusual crater-like feature, unlike anything I had ever seen before,” said Uisdean Nicholson, assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

Impacts on the Earth also increase the chance of acid rain which forms from a combination of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide.

A deep meteor impact 65 million years ago is thought to have been behind a mass extinction event that included many dinosaurs, birds, insects, mammals, and plants.

It is thought that the Earth’s moon is one of the oldest pieces of evidence for this bombardment, and the moon itself is thought to have originally been a piece of the Earth that has broken off.

Using craters, scientists can guess the age of planets and planet-like entities in space without having to land a spacecraft and study them directly.

At least once per year, a 4-meter asteroid will have a near-miss with the Earth, though larger meteorite strikes happen at a much slower rate.

Scientists estimate that 95% of asteroids bigger than a kilometer have already been discovered and the remaining 5% are constantly being searched for in the sky for any threats they might pose.

The scale goes from 0 to 10, with 0 being no hazard to the Earth and 10 being a certain collision that will cause a global catastrophe. Currently, all known objects observed in the sky have a “0” rating, and the highest rating on the scale to date has been a “4.”

To put this time scale into perspective, the earliest human civilizations only invented writing around a little over 5,000 years ago.

On average, the Earth will experience the formation of a 12-mile impact crater once about every one million years.

In recent years, scientists have discovered strange crater-like sites in Siberia that have led to the formation of mysterious “holes.” 

“Global warming is happening, and it’s exacerbated in the Arctic,” Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gas Hydrates Project, told NBC News. “And if this [the Siberian crater phenomenon] is what we think, that it’s related to permafrost thaw, It’s a very visible effect of what’s happening to the Earth.”

Given the rarity of the formation of new meteor impact craters, people might get more used to seeing mysterious crater holes formed from the results of increasingly warm summers in places like the Arctic.