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It was 65.5 million years ago that the dinosaurs were eradicated from our planet, and it's believed that a 6 mile wide asteroid was largely responsible for the extinction of their kind, the impact of which resulted in a crater that spanned a whopping 93 miles. That's a pretty damn big asteroid, right? It sure is. But it's absolutely dwarfed by one that hit many years prior.
As reported by I F'ing Love Science, Stanford University teachers Norman Sleep and Donald Lowe recently used modern day technology to reconstruct the impact of an asteroid that hit South Africa over 3 billion years ago, determining that the formation was an incredible 23 miles wide - nearly four times larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater left behind measured an astounding 297 miles in diameter, which is larger than a handful of entire countries.
They've determined that the gargantuan asteroid traveled at a rate of 12 miles per second, and that the impact resulted in massive tsunamis more devastating than any in recent history. And get this. The collision was so mind-blowingly epic that it actually broke the Earth, forever fracturing our plate tectonic system!
Pick your jaw up off the floor and take a virtual trip over to Turkmenistan's 'Door to Hell,' which is perhaps the most horrifying crater in the world!
