The Vredefort impact
The largest confirmed impact in Earth's history carves a crater perhaps 300 kilometres across.
- When
- Known to
- ± 4 million years
- Era
- Paleoproterozoic, Proterozoic
An asteroid, possibly 20 to 25 kilometres wide, strikes what is now South Africa 2,023 ± 4 million years ago. Modelling suggests the impactor was larger and faster than long assumed, and the original crater may have spanned 250 to 300 kilometres — bigger than Chicxulub by a wide margin. Only the deeply eroded central dome survives. Life at the time was still almost entirely microbial, and appears to have absorbed the blow.