Earth is still collecting scars from space, and scientists are only now learning to read them properly. Newly mapped impact craters, both on land and hidden beneath the oceans, are revealing that large meteorite and asteroid strikes have shaped our planet far more recently and more often than many people realize. At the same time, fresh meteorite finds are delivering pieces of other worlds straight into researchers’ hands, turning the ground beneath our feet into an archive of the solar system.
As I look across this new work, a pattern emerges: the story of impacts is no longer just about dinosaurs and deep time. It is about the Holocene, about modern planetary defence, and about how fragments of Mars and other bodies can help us understand both past catastrophes and future risks.
China’s Holocene “Rare and Young Cr” hidden in plain sight
One of the most striking discoveries sits not in a remote desert but in a populated region of southern China. Researchers have identified a massive, well preserved impact structure dating to the Holocene, a period that began after the last ice age and continues today, describing it as a Rare and Young that records a surprisingly intense and recent meteorite strike. The feature, now formally known as the Jinlin crater, lay effectively hidden in the landscape until detailed fieldwork and geophysical surveys revealed its true nature as an impact scar rather than an ordinary basin.
The impact origin of this structure has been confirmed through a dedicated Journal Reference that documents shock features in rocks and other diagnostic signatures. Located in Zhaoqing in Guangdong Province, the site is now recognized as part of a very small global club of confirmed impact structures, with the Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province crater helping push the total toward roughly 200 known examples worldwide. In that context, Its age places the Jinl feature among the youngest large impacts on Earth, a reminder that the era of big collisions did not end with prehistoric extinctions.
Earth’s “largest modern impact crater” and what it tells us
While the Holocene discovery in China grabs attention because of its youth, scientists are also reframing the scale of recent impacts. Researchers have described The Jinlin structure as Earth’s largest modern, emphasizing that this is not an ancient Proterozoic relic but a feature carved into a landscape humans would recognize. That label reflects both its physical dimensions and its relatively recent formation, which together make it a benchmark for understanding how big impacts interact with today’s climate, ecosystems, and human infrastructure.
To pin down Its age, scientists have relied on careful Soil erosion measurement, comparing how quickly the rim has worn down with regional rates since the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago. Those calculations suggest the Jinlin crater formed within the Holocene, which means any blast effects would have unfolded in an environment already hosting complex human societies elsewhere on the planet. In Year in Review terms, it is the kind of finding that belongs alongside other standout discoveries that, as Year, Review These pieces have noted, reshaped how Some of our basic assumptions about Earth’s recent past are framed.
A 5.6 mile crater under the Atlantic and the 66 m year story
Not all impact scars are visible from the surface. Off the coast of West Africa, geophysicists have mapped a buried structure on the Atlantic seafloor that was initially suspected to be an asteroid crater and has now been confirmed as such. High resolution seismic imaging and core samples, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, show that this underwater imprint dates back roughly 66 m years, tying it to the same broad interval as the Chicxulub impact that ended the Cretaceous. The work, led in part by Dr. Uisdean Nic, demonstrates how modern marine geophysics can uncover impact structures that would have been impossible to recognize from ship decks alone.
The feature, known as the Nadir Crater, spans about 9 kilometers across, or roughly 5.6 mile, and lies some 300 meters below the ocean floor, a depth that has kept it hidden until sophisticated surveys could probe the subsurface. Those same images show deformation patterns and ejecta consistent with a high velocity impact, confirming that the Nadir Crater is not a volcanic caldera or tectonic feature but the scar of a cosmic collision. Together with the Holocene structures on land, this submerged crater underscores that Earth’s surface, continents and oceans alike, is still being reinterpreted as a record of repeated asteroid strikes.
From 2024 YR4 to James Webb: watching the next crater before it forms
These newly recognized craters sharpen the stakes for tracking the objects that could create the next one. A recent example is asteroid 2024 YR4, which briefly captured public attention when early orbit estimates suggested a small chance of impact in the 2030s. Astronomers quickly turned the James Webb Space Telesco toward the object, using infrared analysis to refine its size and composition and finding it to be around 200 feet (60 meters) in diameter. That kind of rapid characterization is essential, because the damage from a 60 meter impactor would be very different from that of a kilometer scale body like the one that carved Chicxulub.
Ground based observatories are still tracking 2024 YR4, and Currently the observation and calculation of its orbit are ongoing, with the potential collision probability with Currently, Earth being updated as new data arrive. Early coverage urged readers to Remember how quickly initial risk estimates can change as more observations come in, a point echoed in discussions of other interstellar visitors that, as Remember pieces have noted, can pass close to Earth or Mars without ever posing a serious threat. A global network of astronomers, coordinated through planetary defence initiatives, monitored 2024 YR4 intensively after its discovery, with one campaign noting that the probability of impact with Earth in 2032 briefly reached a level that was, at A global network, the highest ever recorded for a tracked near Earth object.
Subsequent refinements have dramatically lowered that risk. Detailed orbit modeling now shows that, while 2024 YR4 remains an object of interest, there is no need for immediate alarm, even though at one point its impact probability reached 202 times higher than typical background levels for similar objects. For me, the key lesson is that the same tools used to discover ancient craters, such as precise measurements and global coordination, are now being applied in real time to prevent new ones from forming in populated regions.
Meteorites from Mars: impact science in the palm of a hand
Impact craters are only half the story; the rocks they launch into space can travel for millions of years before falling back to Earth as meteorites. Some of the most revealing specimens come from Mars, where ancient impacts have blasted crustal material into interplanetary orbits that eventually intersect our own planet. A recently described Martian meteorite stands out because it contains substantially more water than any similar rock yet studied, leading researchers to argue that this Share, Martian sample may be in a class by itself. Its chemistry hints at a wetter environment on Mars at the time it formed, which in turn constrains the kinds of impact related hydrothermal systems that might once have supported microbial life.
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