An international team of researchers has discovered a impact crater beneath the ice of Antarctica using two GRACE satellites. It may be one of the largest meteorite craters on Earth. The structure, more than 450 kilometers wide, lies hidden beneath an ice sheet about 1.5 kilometers thick. Could this gigantic impact be connected to the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history?
Was the giant meteorite whose impact crater was discovered in Antarctica the greatest killer of all time? Researchers identified a crater with a diameter of 482 kilometers, buried 1.5 kilometers beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. It likely dates back to a meteorite impact 250 to 300 million years ago. According to scientists, the force of the impact in Wilkes Land was catastrophic for Earth and its inhabitants at the time. Nearly all life on Earth was wiped out.
The meteorite crater in Antarctica was first discovered in 2006 during a joint mission by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which aimed to measure anomalies in Earth’s gravitational field to understand how mass is distributed across the planet and how it changes over time.
New details from 2018 about the gravitational field of East Antarctica, obtained from the GRACE satellites, revealed a striking positive gravity anomaly in a basin about 500 kilometers in diameter.
Some scientists are convinced that deep beneath Antarctica in the Wilkes Land region lies an M-class asteroid, composed mainly of metal.
This discovery also sparked intense debates among conspiracy theorists, who quickly revived claims that the Nazis had built secret installations there during World War II.
The massive impact likely hurled enormous amounts of dust into the atmosphere, creating extremely hostile environmental conditions—months of darkness and corrosive acid rain turned the planet into a hellscape. Only a few primitive shell-bearing organisms survived this inferno. Among them were the ancestors of the dinosaurs, which would go on to dominate animal life for nearly 200 million years. What sounds like a grim scenario marked the end of the Permian period around 250 million years ago. “An estimated 80 to 90 percent of marine and terrestrial life died out,” says Michael J. Benton, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Bristol.
The cause of this mass extinction remains debated among scientists. While some researchers point to meteorite impacts, others attribute it to volcanic eruptions. “Volcanic activity, accompanied by colossal CO₂ emissions, is now considered by many scientists to be the main trigger of the mass extinction,” Benton explains.
The impact crater discovered in East Antarctica is about three times larger than the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, where a meteorite struck around 65 million years ago, an event often linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs. However, the meteorite that created the scar in the Antarctic crust is estimated to have been more than 45 kilometers in diameter, making it several times larger than the so-called “dinosaur killer.”
Heiner Kubny, PolarJournal