Overview
- Researchers report in Matter and Radiation at Extremes that a 900-meter-wide, 90-meter-deep bowl-shaped structure in Zhaoqing, Guangdong, is an impact crater.
- Erosion-rate measurements place its formation in the early-to-mid Holocene, with the latest coverage indicating it likely occurred less than 10,000 years ago.
- Quartz grains from the granite bedrock display planar deformation features produced at roughly 10–35 gigapascals, a diagnostic of hypervelocity impact.
- The team concludes the crater was made by a meteorite rather than a comet, and the impactor’s exact composition remains undetermined.
- Popular Mechanics reports the researchers estimate a roughly 30-meter object traveling about 45,000 miles per hour struck a granite hillside, which helps explain the crater’s preservation despite a wet, erosive climate.