An 800,000 Year Old Meteorite Crater May Have Been Found

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  via Business Insider

  The impact of meteorites can vary greatly, from ending the dinosaurs to bruising a woman's side. Meteorites fall onto Earth very frequently, and they're usually the size of a golf ball. But 800,000 years ago, a 1.2 mile wide meteorite smashed into Earth, scattering glassy debris called tektites across 10% of the Earth's surface. The actual location of where the meteorite hit the Earth had eluded scientists until today.

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  via Smithsonian Mag

  The tektites from this meteorite have been found across Asia, Australia and Antarctica, giving scientists a huge area of potential impact sites. For more than a century, scientists have been searching between these three continents, attempting to find the impact crater, which is assumed to be a mile wide and 300 feet deep. It can't exactly be hard to miss, right?
  

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  via Business Insider

  However, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal points to a location where scientists think the meteorite may have landed: a volcanic field in southeastern Laos. The team's resarch suggests that the crater is buried underground - and that's why it has been so hard to find. 

  The study posits that the crater is located on the Bolaven Plateau, an incredibly photogenic place where lava flows from ancient volcanos fit in the age bracket of the meteorite: between 51,000 and 780,000 years old. Eruptions on this plateau created a bed of layered lava 1,000 feet deep - which would be enough to hide a meteorite impact crater. 

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  via Business Insider

  To test this theory, the researchers testd the tektites found to the rocks in the volcanic field. They matched. Then, they tested the gravitational fields around the Bolaven Plateau, finding an elliptical area 300 feet thick, 11 miles long and 8 miles wide, where the gravity got strange. Craters are filled with less dense material than the rocks around them, and they have slightly weaker gravitational pull. The gravity tests in the plateau indicated the existence of an underground crater. 

  Furthermore, the lava on top of the crater was less than 800,000 years old. And finally, the last piece of the puzzle was found 12 miles away from the volcanic field: a patch of sandstone that appeared to be battered with fractured quartz grains (which can be ejected from meteorites), which are seen through a microscope in the photo above. 

  There's a lot of evidence pointing towards the final resting place of the 800,000 year old meteorite. Until scientists can drill down 300 feet to the crater, we'll have to wait just a little longer until this century long mystery is finally solved. 

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