Overview
- Researchers from Shanghai and Guangzhou report the Jinlin crater near Zhaoqing, Guangdong, preserved within a thick granite weathering crust on a hillside.
- Field surveys and drone imagery map a 900-meter-wide depression that surpasses Russia’s 300-meter Macha site, establishing the largest Holocene impact crater identified so far.
- Quartz collected from the crater shows planar deformation features that form only under 10–35 gigapascal shock pressures, confirming an impact origin.
- Soil-erosion measurements indicate formation in the early-to-mid Holocene, with precise age still to be determined through laboratory dating.
- The team infers a meteorite rather than a comet created the structure, though whether the impactor was iron or stony remains unresolved; the study appears in Matter and Radiation at Extremes (DOI: 10.1063/5.0301625).