Wredefort Crater: a huge trail from an asteroid impact with a diameter of 300 kilometers

Today, the fall to Earth of even the smallest meteorite causes a storm of emotions and attracts everyone's attention. But the modern scale of this phenomenon cannot be compared with past geological eras, when our planet was subjected to a very active "bombardment" from space. Many impact craters - dumb witnesses of the past, are scattered across all continents. But some of them are so huge that their size is not only impossible to estimate standing on the ground, but it is simply hard to imagine. The largest known impact crater known to science is Wredefort, located in the south of the African continent.

Wredefort is located in the province of Free State, in the central part of South Africa. The diameter of the crater reaches about 250-300 km, and the celestial body, the collision with which led to such grandiose consequences, had a diameter of about 10 km. According to scientists, a disaster on a planetary scale occurred more than 2 billion years ago.

This date refers to the Paleoproterozoic era, when only bacteria existed on Earth, so the planet did not experience the mass extinction of fauna or other biological disasters due to a meeting with an asteroid. Active mountain formation processes were going on on Earth at that time, and a fallen asteroid also had a significant impact on the formation of the appearance of our planet.

It is interesting that initially scientists believed that this crater owes its origin to the ancient stratovolcano. But more thorough studies have made it possible to attribute this geological formation to an impact crater, possibly the oldest of all surviving on the planet.

Today in the largest crater on the planet is the town of Wredefort, by whose name the crater got its name. The Baal River flows through the crater, and most of it is occupied by agricultural fields. To preserve the unique object inside the crater and on the territory of the border buffer zone, only agriculture is allowed. Mining, drilling, exploration and other interventions are prohibited, which is strictly monitored by the international organization of UNESCO.