Scientists Terrifying New Discovery Hidden In Australia

Bright Side

Scientists have found what might be the world's largest asteroid impact structure buried deep in southern New South Wales, Australia. This huge Deniliquin structure is a whopping 520 kilometers in diameter, possibly beating the previous record held by South Africa's 300-kilometer-wide Vredefort structure. Can you imagine the chaos when that asteroid hit Earth?  Let's dive into this discovery and explore what could have happened during that colossal impact. It's mind-blowing to think about!  Credit: Sudbury Wanapitei WorldWind: By Vesta, NASA WorldWind, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=500364 Sudbury Impact Structure: By Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148844/sudbury-impact-structure Lonar Crater: By Jesse Allen/NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/8654/lonar-crater-india Gondwana 420 Ma: By Fama Clamosa - https://www.earthbyte.org/gplates-2-0-software-and-data-sets/, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67001070 Animation is created by Bright Side.  #brightside   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Listen to Bright Side on:  Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/idhttps-podcasts-apple-com-podcast-bright-side/id1554898078 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/brightside/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official/ Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en Snapchat - https://www.snapchat.com/p/c6a1e38a-bff1-4a40-9731-2c8234ccb19f/1866144599336960  Stock materials (photos, footages and other):  https://www.depositphotos.com  https://www.shutterstock.com  https://www.eastnews.ru  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me

Transcript

00:00So many asteroids pass through our solar system, and we don't even know about it.

00:06Those are rocky pieces of material left over from the time when our solar system was forming,

00:11about 4.6 billion years ago.

00:14They move around the Sun, but not in the way planets do.

00:18We're talking about true rebels that prefer to follow some pretty strange paths.

00:23Plus, they spin in different ways as they travel between planets and other space objects.

00:29And the majority of them come from the main asteroid belt that's located between Jupiter and Mars.

00:35Most stay there, but Jupiter has quite a strong gravity,

00:39so it can push some of those flying rocks in different directions, and towards us, too.

00:44They're sometimes round, and sometimes they have odd shapes,

00:48with pits and holes from all that crashing into other space rocks.

00:53As we currently know, there are more than a million of them in the main asteroid belt,

00:58and that's all good until some of them move in our direction.

01:02NASA keeps an eye on them, so we know everything's fine, at least for now.

01:07But that wasn't always the case with our beloved home planet.

01:10If Earth could talk, it would probably share so many crazy asteroid stories.

01:16We're talking about those space rocks that left impact craters we call domes.

01:21They have a specific shape, with a raised center,

01:24similar to when you throw a pebble in a pond and see some water splashing upward.

01:29But we'll never be able to learn about many others.

01:33I know this raised center sounds like something you're supposed to see right away,

01:37especially if an asteroid that once slammed into the surface was big.

01:41But we're talking about millions and millions of years of erosion,

01:45so wind, water, and even gravity do what they do best and erase traces.

01:51They wear down impact domes, and some sites even end up hidden under layers of rock and dirt.

01:57Or they disappear forever because Earth's tectonic plates keep moving around.

02:02Check out the Moon. It's experienced many collisions too.

02:06But over there, there's no ocean or tectonic plates moving around,

02:10or even wind to slowly, through millions of years, erase craters from its face.

02:15Basically, its entire history is written on its surface.

02:20But Earth has its own forces that can erase such places as the Vedder Fort impact structure and the Chicxulub crater.

02:26You know, the famous one that wiped out the dinosaurs?

02:30Luckily, scientists have new methods to find ancient craters.

02:34They often focus on the mess impacts made, which means the materials they threw around.

02:39And the Australian continent is especially interesting,

02:43since we're talking about a playground for asteroid hits.

02:46By that, I mean ancient supercontinent Gondwana that dominated the south hundreds of millions of years ago.

02:53Experts know about 38 impacts, plus they speculate about 43 more.

02:59Some structures are relatively small, while others are big and completely hidden.

03:04And recently, a scientist named Tony Yates has discovered strange underground magnetic patterns in New South Wales, Australia.

03:13Yay! New clues of a giant asteroid impact!

03:16And when I say giant, I really mean it.

03:19It's a structure 323 miles in diameter.

03:23This might be the largest impact site ever found.

03:27This spot is called the Deniliquin structure.

03:31Its magnetic patterns show characteristic ripples around the center, like when a rock hits the water.

03:37There are also fractures that go outward from the center.

03:40And it seems rocks from inside Earth ended up pushed into these fractures.

03:45That's a typical story for big asteroid impacts.

03:49This structure was probably located in eastern Gondwana hundreds of millions of years ago,

03:55way before it split into several continents, including Australia.

03:59At the moment, all we know about this crater is what we see on the surface.

04:03To find more information about this collision and get some proof, we'll have to drill into the ground.

04:10An asteroid this big is definitely not a joke.

04:13It could have caused a massive ice age and maybe even wiped out around 85% of species,

04:20even more than the asteroid that ended dinosaurs.

04:23In 4.5 billion years, which is how long our planet has existed, it's been punched by hundreds of big asteroids.

04:31But that doesn't mean every space rock that enters our atmosphere really makes it all the way to the ground.

04:36Most of those that manage to pass the atmosphere are relatively small, for instance, 3 feet across.

04:43That's good for us because any space rock that's less than 82 feet in diameter

04:48most likely won't make it past our planet's atmosphere.

04:51Since these space rocks come towards us very fast, they heat up the gases in the atmosphere, which burns them away.

04:59By the way, once cosmic intruders enter our atmosphere, they turn into meteors.

05:04And in most cases, they don't cause much damage, if any, as they fall down.

05:10But we used to have way larger things flying around and crashing into Earth.

05:14At least 190 of them have left scars you can still see today.

05:19One of the really, really big ones is in South Africa.

05:23It's 99 miles wide. It's actually the largest.

05:26At least that's what scientists think at the moment

05:29because they still need to check as many details as possible about this new crater in Australia.

05:35This one in South Africa formed about 2 billion years ago

05:39and an asteroid that created it was probably larger than the one that had wiped dinosaurs away.

05:45And when an asteroid is bigger than 0.6 miles, it can have really big effects across the world.

05:52This impact was so strong that it could have caused fires everywhere and thrown lots of dust into the air.

05:58And when you have so much dust in the atmosphere, the climate on the planet can change for months or even years.

06:06Then we also have the most popular asteroid that made a giant hole we today call the Chicxulub crater.

06:12You know the story. It crashed into our planet 66 million years ago

06:17when dinosaurs were wandering around, catching food, falling in love, basically just doing their thing.

06:23The crash itself didn't erase them right away.

06:26It threw a lot of debris into space and when it fell back to Earth, fires and flames were everywhere.

06:33The hit also produced a big cloud of dust that covered the planet for years.

06:37This cloud blocked the sunlight which harmed plants and entire food chains.

06:42Even those dinosaurs that survived the crash and such difficult conditions had a hard time finding food.

06:47So they didn't make it.

06:49At least they left us many fossils and turned into the inspiration for movies and stories.

06:55A long time ago in Canada, something big crashed into our planet and left a big hole we today know as the Sudbury Basin.

07:03People used to think it was an asteroid, but now some experts think it might have been a giant comet made up of a mix of ice and rocks.

07:11The hole is almost gone now because of weather conditions though.

07:15But people still get to mine iron and nickel there and at the same time find the leftovers of whatever space object fell there.

07:23If you move deep in southern India, you'll find a big hole called Lonar Crater.

07:29Locals stumbled upon it 200 years ago and believed it might be from a volcano.

07:34But now we know it's a trace from a meteor that crashed into the ground about 35 to 50 thousand years ago.

07:42What's so special about this crater is that it's the only one known to have formed in a type of rock called basalt.

07:48Around the crater, there are hills covered in trees and animals like peafowls and gazelles live there.

07:54Birds also like to visit the lake near the crater during the winter.

07:58And the lake itself is quite interesting too.

08:01It can turn pink because of all those tiny organisms that live there.

08:05But this color change doesn't last long.

08:09That's it for today.

08:11So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

08:16Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side.

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