[Rockhounds] Satellite Spots Massive Asteroid Impact Crater in China

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

In 2019, researchers first described a 1.15-mile-wide crater in a mountain
range in northeast China; late last year, a NASA satellite imaged the
crater from space, giving a broad new view the impact’s aftermath.

The crater is in Heilongjiang Province’s Yilan County. According to the
researchers who described
<https://www.sciengine.com/publisher/scp/journal/CSB/65/10/10.1360/TB-2019-0704?slug=abstract>
it
in 2019, it’s the second confirmed impact structure in China. The site has
long been known to locals, who call it “Quanshan,” or “circular mountain
ridge,” according to a NASA Earth Observatory release
<https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149515/young-impact-crater-uncovered-in-yilan>
.

The southern rim of the crater has eroded, so from above the impact site
looks more like a crescent. The rim is nearly 500 feet tall at its
highest points, the researchers reported, and is slightly wider than
China’s previously confirmed impact strucgture, Xiuyan, which is 1.12 miles
across.

Last year, a different team of researchers determined
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.13711> that the crater
formed between 46,000 and 53,000 years ago, making it the largest crater
less than 100,000 years old. They figured out that the crater was formed by
an asteroid by drilling nearly 1,500 feet into its center, where they
found melted stone, shocked quartz, and glass in the ancient
sediments—evidence of a high-temperature blast. Radiocarbon dating of the
shocked sediments gave researchers the surprisingly recent date.

https://gizmodo.com/satellite-spots-massive-asteroid-impact-crater-in-china-1848602154