Scientists have confirmed that a large crater in China’s southern Guangdong province formed as a result of an asteroid impact around 10,000 years ago, at a time when human civilisation was undergoing rapid development.
The Jinlin crater, located near the city of Zhaoqing, is just the fifth confirmed impact crater in China and the first one to be identified in the country’s southern region.
Through analysis of the tilted bowl-shaped crater on a hillside with a diameter of about 900 metres (2,952 feet), the team determined that it was likely caused by an extraterrestrial object around 30 metres (98.5 feet) in diameter.
“Southern China covers about one-quarter of the nation’s land area. The Jinlin crater is the first confirmed impact structure in this region,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Matter and Radiation at Extremes on October 15.
“The energy released by the impact is estimated to be 600,000 tonnes of TNT,” said Chen Ming, study author and a researcher at the Centre for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research.
