False-colour electron microscope image of a shocked grain of zircon recovered from the Stac Fada Member. The red and pink material is a high-pressure polymorph of zircon, arranged in shock lamellae. Zircon is rendered in cyan, some of which is in granulated form. Credit: Kirkland et al. 2025, Fig 2C
Judging by its content of shards and spherules made of murky green glass, one of the lowest units in the Torridonian continental sediments of NW Scotland had long been regarded as simply red sandstone that contained volcanic debris. This Stac Fada Member was thus celebrated as the only sign of a volcanic contribution to a vast thickness (up to 2.5 km) of Neoproterozoic lake and fluviatile sediments. Current flow indicators suggested that the Torridonian was laid down by large alluvial fans derived by erosion of much older crystalline basement far to what is today the west. That is, the Archaean core of the ancient continent of Laurentia, now the other side of the North Atlantic. In 2002 more sophisticated sedimentological and geochemical analysis of the Stac Fada Member revealed a surprise: it contains anomalously elevated platinum-group elements, quartz grains that show signs of shock and otherworldly chromium isotope concentrations. The 10 m thick bed is made from ejecta, perhaps from a nearby impact crater to the WNW concluded from brittle fractures that may have been produced by the impact. Some idea of its age was suggested by Ar-Ar dating of feldspar crystals (~1200 Ma) believed to have formed authigenically in the hot debris. Being the only decent impactite known in Britain, it continues to attract attention.
A group of geoscientists from Western Australia, NASA and the UK, independent of the original discoverers, have now added new insights ( Kirkland, C.L. and 12 others 2025. A one-billion-year old Scottish meteorite impact. Geology, v. 53, early online publication; DOI: 10.1130/G53121.1). They dated shocked zircon grains using U-Pb analyses at 990 ± 22 Ma; some 200 Ma younger than the previously dated, authigenic feldspars. Detrital feldspar grains in the Stac Fada Member yield Rb-Sr radiometric ages of 1735 and 1675, that are compatible with Palaeoproterozoic granites in the underlying Lewisian Gneiss Complex.
Photomicrograph of Bicellum brazieiri: scale bar = 10μm; arrows point to dark spots that may be cell nuclei (credit: Charles Wellman, Sheffield University)
In a separate publication (Kirkland, C.L et al 2025. 1 billion years ago, a meteorite struck Scotland and influenced life on Earth. The Conversation, 29 April 2025) three of the authors take things a little further, as their title suggests. In this Conversation piece they ponder, perhaps unwarily, on the spatial and temporal association of the indubitable impact with remarkably well-preserved spherical fossils found in Torridonian lake-bed sediments (Bicellum brasieri, reported in Earth-logs in May 2021), which are the earliest-known holozoan animal ancestors. The Torridonian phosphatic concretions in which these important fossils were found at a different locality are roughly 40 Ma younger than the Stac Fada impactite. The authors of the Conversation article appeal to the residual thermal effect of the impact as a possible driver for the appearance of these holozoan organisms. Whether a residual thermal anomaly would last long enough for them to evolve to this biological status would depend on the magnitude of the impact, of which we know nothing. Eukaryote fossils are known from at least 650 Ma older sedimentary rocks in northern China and perhaps as far back as 2.2 Ga in a soil that formed in the Palaeoproterozoic of South Africa. Both the Torridonian organism and impactite were found in a small area of fascinating geology that has been studied continuously in minute detail since Victorian times, and visited by most living British geologists during their undergraduate days. Ideas will change as curiosity draws geologists and palaeobiologists to less-well studied sites of Proterozoic antiquity, quite possibly in northern China.
A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook
Earth has been through a great many catastrophes, but the vast majority of those of which we know were slow-burning in a geological sense. They resulted in unusually high numbers of extinctions at the species- to family levels over a few million years and the true mass extinctions seem to have been dominated by build ups of greenhouse gases emitted by large igneous provinces. Even the most famous at the end of the Cretaceous Period, which did for the dinosaurs and considerably more organisms that the media hasn’t puffed, was partly connected to the eruption of the Deccan flood basalts of western India. Yet the event that did the real damage was a catastrophe that appeared in a matter of seconds: the time taken for the asteroid that gouged the Chicxulub crater to pass through the atmosphere. Its energy was huge and because it was delivered in such a short time its sheer power was unimaginable. Gradually geologists have recognised signs of an increasing number of tangible structures produced by Earth’s colliding with extraterrestrial objects, which now stands at 190 that have been confirmed.
Landsat image mosaic of the Palaeoarchaean granite-greenstone terrain of the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Granite bodies show as pale blobs, the volcanic and sedimentary greenstone belts in shades of grey. The site of Kirkland et al.’s study site is at the tip of the red arrow
The frequency of impact craters falls off with age, most having formed in the last ~550 million years (Ma) during the Phanerozoic Eon, only 25 being known from the Precambrian, which spanned around 88 percent of geological time. That is largely a consequence of the dynamic processes of tectonics, erosion and sedimentation that may have obliterated or hidden a larger number. Earth is unique in that respect, the surfaces of other rocky bodies in the Solar System showing vastly more. The Moon is a fine example, especially as it has been Earth’s companion since it formed 4.5 billion years ago (Ga) after the proto-Earth collided with a now vanished planet about the size of Mars. The relative ages of lunar impact structures combined with radiometric ages of the surfaces that they hit has allowed the frequency of collisions to be assessed through time. Applied to the sizes of the craters such data can show how the amount of kinetic energy inflicted on the lunar surface has changed with time. During what geologists refer to as the Hadean Eon (before 4 Ga), the moon underwent continuous bombardment that reached a crescendo between 4.1 and about 3.8 Ga. Thereafter impacts tailed off. Always having been close to the Moon, the Earth cannot have escaped the flux of objects experienced by the lunar surface. Because of Earth’s much greater gravitation pull it was probably hit by more objects per unit area. Apart from some geochemical evidence from Archaean rocks (see: Tungsten and Archaean heavy bombardment; July 2002) and several beds of 3.3 Ga old sediment in South Africa that contain what may have been glassy spherules there are no signs of actual impact structures earlier than a small crater dated at around 2.4 Ga in NE Russia.
Shatter cones in siltstone near Marble Bar in the Pilbara Province: finger for scale. Credit: Kirkland et al.; Fig 2a
Now a group of geologists from Curtin University, Perth Western Australia, and the Geological Survey of Western Australia have published their findings of indisputable signs of an impact site in the northern part of Western Australia (Kirkland, C.L. et al. 2025. A Paleoarchaean impact crater in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Nature Communications, v. 16, article 2224; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57558-3). In fact there is no discernible crater at the locality, but sedimentary strata show abundant evidence of a powerful impact in the form of impact-melt droplets in the form of spherules together with shatter cones. These structures form as a result of sudden increase in pressure to 2 to 30 GPa: an extreme that can only be generated in underground nuclear explosions, and thus likely to bear witness to large asteroid impacts. The shocked rocks are immediately overlain by pillow lavas dated at 3.47 Ga, making the impact the earliest known. It has been speculated that impacts during the Archaean and Hadean Eons helped create conditions for the complex organic chemistry that eventually to the first living cells. Considering that entry of hypervelocity asteroids into the early Earth’s atmosphere probably caused such compression that temperatures were raised by adiabatic heating to about ten times that of the Sun’s surface, their ‘entry flashes’ would have sterilised the surface below; the opposite of such notions. Impacts may, however, have delivered both water and simple, inorganic hydrocarbons. Together with pulverisation of rock to make ‘fertiliser’ elements (e.g. K and P) more easily dissolved, they may have had some influence. Their input of thermal energy seems to me to be of little consequence, for decay of unstable isotopes of U, Th and K in the mantle would have heated the planet quite nicely and continuously from Year Zero onwards.
A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook
In March 1989 an asteroid half a kilometre across passed within 500 km of the Earth at a speed of 20 km s-1. Making some assumptions about its density, the kinetic energy of this near miss would have been around 4 x 1019 J: a million times more than Earth’s annual heat production and humanity’s annual energy use; and about half the power of detonating every thermonuclear device ever assembled. Had that small asteroid struck the Earth all this energy would have been delivered in a variety of forms to the Earth System in little more than a second – the time it would take to pass through the atmosphere. The founder of “astrogeology” and NASA’s principal geological advisor for the Apollo programme, the late Eugene Shoemaker, likened the scenario to a ‘small hill falling out of the sky’. (Read a summary of what would happen during such an asteroid strike). But that would have been dwarfed by the 10 to 15 km impactor that resulted in the ~200 km wide Chicxulub crater and the K-Pg mass extinction 66 Ma ago. Evidence has been assembled for Earth having been struck during the Archaean around 3.6 billion years (Ga) ago by an asteroid 200 to 500 times larger: more like four Mount Everests ‘falling out of the sky’ (Drabon, N. et al. 2024. Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean surface environments and life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 121, article e2408721121; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408721121
Impact debris layer in the Palaeoarchaean Barberton greenstone belt of South Africa, which contains altered glass spherules and fragments of older carbonaceous cherts. (Credit: Credit: Drabon, N. et al., Appendix Fig S2B)
In fact the Palaeoarchaean Era (3600 to 3200 Ma) was a time of multiple large impacts. Yet their recognition stems not from tangible craters but strata that contain once glassy spherules, condensed from vaporised rock, interbedded with sediments of Palaeoarchaean ‘greenstone belts’ in Australia and South Africa (see: Evidence builds for major impacts in Early Archaean; August 2002, and Impacts in the early Archaean; April 2014), some of which contain unearthly proportions of different chromium isotopes (see: Chromium isotopes and Archaean impacts; March 2003). Compared with the global few millimetres of spherules at the K-Pg boundary, the Barberton greenstone belt contains eight such beds up to 1.3 m thick in its 3.6 to 3.3 Ga stratigraphy. The thickest of these beds (S2) formed by an impact at around 3.26 Ga by an asteroid estimated to have had a mass 50 to 200 times that of the K-Pg impactor.
Above the S2 bed are carbonaceous cherts that contain carbon-isotope evidence of a boom in single-celled organisms with a metabolism that depended on iron and phosphorus rather than sunlight. The authors suggest that the tsunami triggered by impact would have stirred up soluble iron-2 from the deep ocean and washed in phosphorus from the exposed land surface, perhaps some having been delivered by the asteroid itself. No doubt such a huge impact would have veiled the Palaeoarchaean Earth with dust that reduced sunlight for years: inimical for photosynthesising bacteria but unlikely to pose a threat to chemo-autotrophs. An unusual feature of the S2 spherule bed is that it is capped by a layer of altered crystals whose shapes suggest they were originally sodium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate. They may represent flash-evaporation of up to tens of metres of ocean water as a result of the impact. Carbonates are less soluble than salt and more likely to crystallise during rapid evaporation of the ocean surface than would NaCl.
Time line of possible events following a huge asteroid impact during the Palaeoarchaean. (Credit: Drabon, N. et al. Fig 8)
So it appears that early extraterrestrial bombardment in the early Archaean had the opposite effect to the Chicxulub impactor that devastated the highly evolved life of the late Mesozoic. Many repeats of such chaos during the Palaeoarchaean could well have given a major boost to some forms of early, chemo-autotrophic life, while destroying or setting back evolutionary attempts at photo-autotrophy.
Apart from the ages and geochemistry of a few hundred zircon grains we have no direct evidence of what the earliest crust of the Earth was like. The vast bulk of the present crust is younger than about 4 billion years. The oldest tangible crustal rocks occur in the 4.2 billion year (Ga) old Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt on Hudson Bay. The oldest zircon grains have compositions that suggest that they formed during the crystallisation of andesitic magmas about 4.4 Ga ago about 140 Ma after the Earth accreted. But, according to an idea that emerged decades ago, that does not necessarily represent the earliest geology. Geochemists have shown that the bulk compositions of the Earth and Moon are so similar that they almost certainly share an early history. Rocks from the lunar highlands – the light areas that surround the dark basaltic maria – collected during the Apollo missions are significantly older (up to 4.51 Ga). They are made mainly of calcium-rich feldspars. These anorthosites have a lower density that basaltic magma. So it is likely that the feldspars crystallised from an all-enveloping ‘magma ocean’ and floated to form an upper crust on the moon. Such a liquid outer layer could only have formed by a staggering input of energy. It is believed that what became the Moon was flung from the Earth following collision with another planetary body as vapour, which then collapsed under gravity and condensed to a molten state (see: Moon formed from vapour cloud; January 2008). Crystallisation of the bulk of anorthosites has been dated to between 4.42 to 4.35 Ga (see: Moon-forming impact dated; March 2009). The Earth would likely have had a similar magma ocean produced by the impact (a much fuller discussion can be found here), but no tangible trace has been discovered, though there is subtle geochemical evidence.
The surface geology of Mars has been mapped in great detail from orbiting satellites and various surface Rovers have examined sedimentary rocks – one of them is currently collecting samples for eventual return to Earth. Currently, the only materials with a probable Martian origin are rare meteorites; there are 224 of them out of 61 thousand meteorites in collections. They are deemed to have been flung from its surface by powerful impacts to land fortuitously on Earth. It is possible to estimate when they were ejected from the effects of cosmic-ray bombardment to which they were exposed after ejection, which produces radioactive isotopes of a variety of elements that can be used in dating. So far, those analysed were flung into space no more than 20 Ma ago. Meteorites with isotopic ‘signatures’ and mineral contents so different from others and from terrestrial igneous rocks are deemed to have a Martian origin by a process of elimination. They also contain proportions of noble gases (H, Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe) that resemble that of the present atmosphere of Mars. Almost all of them are mafic to ultramafic igneous rocks in two groups: about 25 % that have been dated at between 1.4 to 1.3 Ga; the rest are much younger at about 180 Ma. But one that was recovered from the desert surface in West Sahara, NW Africa (NWA 7034, nicknamed ‘Black Beauty’) is unique. It is a breccia mainly made of materials derived from a sodium-rich basaltic andesite source, and contains much more water than all other Martian meteorites.
The ‘Black Beauty’ meteorite from Mars (NWA 7035) with a polished surface and a 2 mm wide microscope view of a thin section: the pale clasts are fragments of pyroxenes and plagioclase feldspars; the rounded dark grey clast is a fine-grained basaltic andesite. (Credits: NASA; Andrew Tindall)
If you would like to study the make-up of NWA 7035 in detail you can explore it and other Martian meteorites by visiting the Virtual Microsope devised by Dr Andrew Tindall and Kevin Quick of the British Open University.
The initial dating of NWA 7034 by a variety of methods yielded ages between 1.5 to 1.0 Ga, but these turned out to represent radiometric ‘resetting’ by a high-energy impact event around 1.5 Ga ago. Its present texture of broken clasts set in a fine-grained matrix suggests that the breccia formed from older crustal rock smashed and ejected during that impact to form a debris ‘blanket’ around the crater. Cosmogenic dating of the meteorite indicates that the debris was again flung from the surface of Mars at some time in the last 10 Ma to launch NWA 7034 beyond Mars’s gravitational field eventually to land in northwest Africa. But that is not the end of the story, because increasingly intricate radiometric dating has been conducted more recently.
‘Black Beauty’ contains rock and mineral fragments that have yielded dates as old as 4.48 Ga. So the breccia seems to have formed from fragments of the early crust of Mars. Indeed it represents the oldest planetary rock that has ever come to light. Some meteorites (carbonaceous chondrites) date back to the origin of the Solar System at around 4.56 Ga ago, and were a major contributor to the bulk composition of the rocky planets. However, the material in NWA 7034 could only have evolved from such primordial materials through processes taking place within the mantle of Mars. That was very early in the planet’s history: less than 80 Ma after it first began to accrete. It could therefore be a key to the early history of all the rocky planets, including the Earth.
There are several scenarios that might account for the composition of NWA 7034. The magma from which its components originated may have been produced by direct partial melting of the planet’s mantle shortly after accretion. However, experimental partial melting of ultramafic mantle suggests that andesitic magmas would be unlikely to form by such a primary process. But other kinds of compositional differentiation, perhaps in an original magma ocean, remain to be explored. Unlike the Earth-Moon system, there is no evidence for anorthosites exposed at the Martian surface that would have floated to become crust once such a vast amount of melt began to cool. Some scientists, however, have suggested that to be a possibility for early Mars. Another hypothesis, by analogy with what is known about the earliest Archaean processes on Earth, is secondary melting of a primordial basaltic crust, akin to the formation of Earth’s early continental crust.
Only a new robotic or crewed mission to the area from which NWA 7034 was ‘launched’ can take ideas much further. But where on Mars did ‘Black Beauty’ originate? A team from Australia, France, Cote d’ Ivoire, and the US have used a range of Martian data sets to narrow down the geographic possibilities (Lagain, A., and 13 others 2022. Early crustal processes revealed by the ejection site of the oldest martian meteorite. Nature Communications, v. 13, article 3782; DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-31444-8). The meteorite contains a substantially higher content of the elements thorium and potassium than do other Martian meteorites. Long-lived radioactive isotopes of K, Th and U generate gamma-ray emissions with distinctly different wavelengths and energy levels. Those for each element have been mapped from orbit. NWA 7034 also has very distinct magnetic properties, and detailed data on variations on the magnetic field intensity of Mars have also been acquired by remote sensing. Images from orbit allow relative ages of the surface to be roughly mapped from the varying density of impact craters: the older the surface, the more times it has been struck by projectiles of all sizes. These data also detect of craters large enough to have massively disrupted Martian crustal materials to form large blankets of impact breccias like NWA 7034. That is, ‘targets’ for the much later impact that sent the meteorite Earthwards. Using a supercomputer, Lagain et al. have cut the possibilities down to 19 likely locations. Their favoured source is the relatively young Karratha crater in the Southern Hemisphere to the west of the Tharsis Bulge. It formed on a large ejecta blanket associated with the ancient (~1.5 Ga) 40 km wide Khujirt crater.
Interesting, but sufficiently so to warrant an awesome bet in the form of a mission budget?
In 2018 airborne ice-penetrating radar over the far northwest of the Greenland revealed an impact crater as large as the extent of Washington DC, USA beneath the Hiawatha Glacier. The ice surrounding it was estimated to be younger than 100 ka. This seemed to offer a measure of support for the controversial hypothesis that an impact may have triggered the start of the millennium-long Younger Dryas episode of frigidity (12.9 to 11.7 ka). This notion had been proposed by a group of scientists who claimed to have found mineralogical and geochemical signs of an asteroid impact at a variety of archaeological sites of roughly this age in North America, Chile and Syria. A new study of the Hiawatha crater by a multinational team, including the original discoverers of the impact structure, has focussed on sediments deposited beyond the edge of the Greenland ice cap by meltwater streams flowing along its base. (Kenny, G.G. et al. 2022. A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure. Science Advances, v.8, article eabm2434; DOI: 10.1126/science.eabm2434).
Colour-coded subglacial topography from airborne radar sounding over the Hiawatha Glacier of NW Greenland (Credit: Kjaer et al. 2018; Fig. 1D)
Where meltwater emerges from the Hiawatha Glacier downstream of the crater there are glaciofluvial sands and gravels that began to build up after 2010 when rapid summer melting began, probably due to global warming. As luck would have it, the team found quartz grains that contained distinctive planar features that are characteristic of impact shock. They also found pebbles of glassy impact melts that contain clasts of bedrock, further grains of shocked quartz and tiny needles of plagioclase feldspar that crystallised from the melt. Also present were small grains of the mineral zircon (ZrSiO4), both as pristine crystals in the bedrock clasts and porous, grainy-textured grains showing signs of deformation in the feldspathic melt rock. So, two materials that can be radiometrically dated are available: feldspars suitable for the 40Ar/39Ar method and zircons for uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating. The feldspars proved to be about 58 million years old; i.e. of Late Palaeocene age. The pristine zircon grains from bedrock clasts yielded Palaeoproterozoic U-Pb ages (~1915 Ma), which is the general age of the Precambrian metamorphic basement that underpins northern Greenland. The deformed zircon samples have a very precise U-Pb age of 57.99±0.54 Ma. There seems little doubt that the impact structure beneath the Hiawatha Glacier formed towards the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.
During the Palaeocene, Northern Greenland was experiencing warm conditions and sediments of that age show that it was covered with dense forest. The group that since 2007 has been advocating the influence of an impact over the rapid onset of the Younger Dryas acknowledges that the Hiawatha crater cannot support their view. But they have an alternative: an airburst of an incoming projectile. Although scientists know such phenomena do occur, as one did over the Tunguska area in Siberia on the morning of 30 June 1908. Research on the Tunguska Event has discovered geochemical traces that may implicate an extraterrestrial object, but coincidentally the area affected is underlain by the giant SIberian Traps large igneous province that arguably might account for geochemical anomalies. Airbursts need to have been observed to have irrefutable recognition. Two posts from October 2021 – A Bronze Age catastrophe: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? and Wide criticism of Sodom airburst hypothesis emerges – suggest that some scientists question the data used repeatedly to infer extraterrestrial events by the team that first suggested an impact origin for the Younger Dryas.
Radar microwaves are able to penetrate easily through several kilometres of ice. Using the arrival times of radar pulses reflected by the bedrock at glacial floor allows ice depth to be computed. When deployed along a network of flight lines during aerial surveys the radar returns of large areas can be converted to a grid of cells thereby producing an image of depth: the inverse of a digital elevation model. This is the only means of precisely mapping the thickness variations of an icecap, such as those that blanket Antarctica and Greenland. The topography of the subglacial surface gives an idea of how ice moves, the paths taken by liquid water at its base, and whether or not global warming may result in ice surges in parts of the icecap. The data can also reveal topographic and geological features hidden by the ice (see The Grand Greenland Canyon September 2013).
Colour-coded subglacial topography from radar sounding over the Hiawatha Glacier of NW Greenland (Credit: Kjaer et al. 2018; Fig. 1D)
Such a survey over the Hiawatha Glacier of NW Greenland has showed up something most peculiar (Kjaer, K.H. and 21 others 2018. A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland. Science Advances, v. 4, eaar8173; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar8173). Part of the ice margin is an arc, which suggests the local bed topography takes the form of a 31km wide, circular depression. The exposed geology shows no sign of a structural control for such a basin, and is complex metamorphic basement of Palaeoproterozoic age. Measurements of ice-flow speeds are also anomalous, with an array of higher speeds suggesting accelerated flow across the depression. The radar image data confirm the presence of a subglacial basin, but one with an elevated rim and a central series of small peaks. These are characteristic of an impact structure that has only been eroded slightly; i.e. a fairly recent one and one of the twenty-five largest impact craters on Earth.. Detailed analysis of raw radar data in the form of profiles through the ice reveals that the upper part is finely layered and undisturbed. The layering continues into the ice surrounding the basin and is probably of Holocene age (<11.7 ka), based on dating of ice in cores through the surrounding icecap. The lower third is structurally complex and shows evidence for rocky debris. Sediment deposited by subglacial streams where they emerge along the arcuate rim contain grains of shocked quartz and glass, as well as expected minerals from the crystalline basement rocks. Some of the shocked material contains unusually high concentrations of transition-group metals, platinum-group elements and gold; further evidence for impact of extraterrestrial material – probably an iron asteroid that was originally more than 1 km in diameter. The famous Cape York iron meteorite, which weighs 31 t – worked by local Innuit to forge harpoon blades – fell in NW Greenland about 200 km away.
The central issue is not that Hiawatha Glacier conceals a large impact crater, but its age. It certainly predates the start of the Holocene and is no older than the start of Greenland glaciation about 2.6 Ma ago. That only Holocene ice layers are preserved above the disrupted ice that rests immediately on top of the crater raises once again the much-disputed possibility of an asteroid impact having triggered the Younger Dryas cooling event and associated extinctions of large mammals in North America at about 12.9 ka (see Impact cause for Younger Dryas draws flak May 2008). Only radiometric dating of the glassy material found in the glaciofluvial sediments will be able to resolve that particular controversy.
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