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The Zhamanshin Impact Event Was Likely Much More Destructive Than Thought

April 14, 2026
The Zhamanshin Impact Event Was Likely Much More Destructive Than Thought
By Evan Gough (https://ift.tt/2asRWMw)

The Meteor Crater or Barringer Crater in Arizona is only about 50,000 years old and is the most well-preserved crater on Earth. Ancient craters like the Zhamanshin crater in Kazakhstan are far less well-preserved, and measuring its actual size is challenging becuase it was created almost one million years ago. New research shows that the Zhamanshin crater could be twice as large as thought, and far more destructive. Image Credit: By National Map Seamless Server - NASA Earth Observatory, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7549781

Around 900,000 years ago, an impactor slammed into modern-day Kazakhstan and excavated a crater about 14 km in diameter. It was the most recent hypervelocity impactor powerful enough to trigger a nuclear winter, but not an exinction. New research suggests the crater is almost twice as large, showing that the energy released by the impact was much greater than thought.



April 15, 2026 at 12:34AM
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