NASA Image Reveals How Asteroid Transformed a Mountain

The sheer power of an asteroid impact that gouged a three-mile-long trough in the ground and buckled local rocks has been revealed in a NASA satellite image. Estimated to have been 700–1,300 feet across, the space rock slammed into what is today a mountain range in Australia's Northern Territory some 600 million years ago. At this time—in the Ediacaran Period—the land was overwhelmingly barren and lifeless; although shallow seas played host to an array of strange, soft bodied creatures. Some of these weird critters may have been the victims of the asteroid, which is thought to have slammed into either a shallow sea or onto land, leaving a signature of the impact in the rocks of the modern-day Davenport Range, even after the crater mostly eroded.

"On February 3, 2025, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of the impact site, an area called the Amelia Creek Impact Structure," NASA said. "The long, narrow shape of the crater and the pattern of regional deformation are signs that the asteroid struck at an extremely oblique (shallow) angle." According to the space agency, the impact gouged a "canoe-shaped trough" some three miles long and 0.6 miles wide into the ancient landscape. Based on analysis of satellite measurements, the collision deformed sedimentary and volcanic rock layers as far as 6.2 miles to the north and south of the impact crater, while leaving the east and west relatively unscathed. NASA added: "A steeper-angle asteroid impact—such as the one that doomed the dinosaurs—would have left a deeper, more symmetrical crater and created an elevated feature in the center of the crater known as a central uplift." Asteroids that land at a shallow angle also tend to cause less damage because they spend more time passing through the Earth's atmosphere, which helps them to burn off more mass during reentry—and can cause bodies to break into smaller pieces before impact. The regional deformation is not the only sign of an impact event at Amelia Creek. Since the 1980s, geologists have discovered fan-shaped fractures in quartz-based rocks in the area —now known to be so-called "shatter cones"—that form when shock waves thunder through rock. The presence of these rare features indicate that the rocks were subjected to pressures in the range of 290,000–4,350,000 pounds per square inch. "All of the area's shatter cones are distributed in a crescent-like pattern mainly to the south of the crater, another sign that the asteroid struck at a shallow angle," NASA explained. While the Amelia Creek impact was likely only felt on a regional basis, there is evidence to suggest that two other impacts during the Ediacaran Period had much greater—and likely even global—effects. These other asteroid strikes, the space agency explained, led to global changes in the climate and ocean chemistry, alongside causing the extinction of a mysterious class of microfossils known as the "acritarchs." Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about asteroids? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.