An ancient impact site in a remote corner of northern Australia was recently spotted by Earth-observing satellites monitoring our planet’s resources.
The images, captured in early February by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, revealed the Land Down Under’s Amelia Creek impact structure, a one-by-five-kilometer canoe-shaped feature where an ancient collision with a space object deformed the region’s rock strata.
The massive asteroid that created the feature, believed to be as much as 1300 feet across, is recognizable after the passing of 600 million years by structural folds still visible in the surrounding sedimentary and volcanic rock layers.
Tracing an Impact to Its Ediacaran Roots
The event occurred during the Ediacaran Period, which borrows its name from South Australia’s Ediacara Hills. This crucial period in Earth’s early history saw the rise of the first large soft-bodied complex organisms, whose fossil remains represent the earliest evidence of the evolution of multicellular animals, or metazoans, known to scientists.
Although these inhabitants of the ancient Earth would come along later in the 96-million-year period comprising the Ediacara, as Earth emerged from the preceding Cryogenian Period, where the planet was blanketed in ice, most of the surface world was void of any life.
The same cannot be said of the surrounding shallow seas, where a diverse assemblage of Ediacaran biota began to flourish, including wormlike aquatic beasts and fernlike oceanic organisms that protruded several feet from their locations on the ocean floor.
These bizarre denizens of Earth’s Ediacaran seas were also likely among the casualties of the impact that collided with the area known today as the Davenport Range in northern Australia. Despite erosion removing much of the impact structure’s features over the eons, its characteristic elongated shape can still be clearly seen in satellite imagery.
Landsat 8’s Operational Land Manager Spots an Impact Structure
On February 3, 2025, the Landsat 8 satellite’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) spotted the Amelia Creek impact structure in the imagery it collected as it passed over northern Australia.
impact structure
The Amelia Creek impact structure is found within the area close to the center of the encircled region in the image above (Credit: W. Liang/NASA Earth Observatory/USGS/Shuttle Radar Topography Mission)
Analysis of the new imagery revealed a 10-kilometer area of deformation in the surrounding rock, visible to the north and south of the primary impact site. The crater’s elongated shape suggests that the asteroid that left its mark at the time of impact hundreds of millions of years ago would have struck at a shallow angle.
Compared with the deeper, symmetrical features found at impact sites like the Chicxulub crater, which is associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Amelia Creek impact structure’s appearance suggests a far more oblique angle of impact. However, the destruction it caused remains visible today.
The new imagery was made available on NASA’s Earth Observatory website.
Shock Waves and Shatter Cones
While the satellite images collected by Landsat 8 in February clearly show what remains of this ancient asteroid impact site, additional clues can be found at ground level, including fan-shaped structures embedded in nearby quartzite rock first discovered in the 1980s. These rare structures, known as shatter cones, are a telltale signature of an impact event resulting from the shock waves produced when the object collides with the Earth.
Fast Radio Burst CHIME
In the case of the Amelia Creek impact site, all the shatter cones in the area fall within a crescent-shaped pattern toward the south of the crater, which further supports the oblique angle of the asteroid’s strike.
Although shallow-angle impacts are believed to cause less severe damage than those at deeper angles like Chicxulub, it remains unclear how much damage the Amelia Creek asteroid might have caused 600 million years ago when it collided with what is now northern Australia. Still, the oblique approach angle would have allowed the asteroid more time to burn off portions of its mass during reentry, which also sometimes leads to asteroids separating into several smaller fragments during an airburst prior to impact.
There is some geological evidence that two additional, much larger impacts may have occurred during the Ediacaran Period, both of which may have had far more devastating global effects. It has been theorized that creatures that once thrived during this period, known as acritarchs, might have succumbed to global changes that occurred in the aftermath of these impacts.
Additional information on the new Landsat 8 images of the Amelia Creek impact structure can be found at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work atmicahhanks.comand on X:@MicahHanks.