Back in 2006, a group of researchers led by Professor Ralph von Frese from Ohio University in Antarctica discovered a 480-kilometer crater, which, according to scientists, was the cause of Australia. In this crater, a huge and very dense mass of metal was discovered. The width of the object is approximately 300 kilometers. The depth at which it is located is 848 meters.
The giant meteorite trail could not have been found earlier because it is located in the eastern part of the Antarctic ice sheet at a depth of almost two kilometers. The giant crater is located in the Wilkes Land area in eastern Antarctica and southern Australia. And this indicates that the object that left this crater could have caused the breakaway of Australia from the supercontinent of Gondwana.
The discovery was made thanks to the analysis of data on gravitational deviations recorded using NASA's GRACE satellites. They recorded a 320-kilometer gravity anomaly.
According to experts, the age of the crater is about 250 million years. Thus, it turns out that it arose much earlier than the Chicxulub crater, which is associated with the death of many prehistoric animals.
Estimating the size of the celestial body that left behind the crater found, scientists believe that it had a diameter of about 48 kilometers - four or five times the size of the asteroid that created Chicxulub crater.
"The collision in the Wilkes Land area is much more than that which destroyed the dinosaurs and probably caused a terrible catastrophe," Dr. von Frese said at the time.
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In addition to the cosmic version of the origin of the crater, which includes assumptions about a large asteroid, other, more intriguing hypotheses have appeared. There are suggestions that under the ice of Antarctica is a giant alien spacecraft.