What Created All Those Gold Filled Cracks In Western Australia?

[Steve Herschbach]

Very interesting....... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/21/snowball-earth-oldest-asteroid-impact-site-discovered-australia/4531149002/

“Some 2.2 billion years ago, an asteroid slammed into the Earth, leaving behind a massive, 43-mile-wide crater in what's now Western Australia, scientists announced Tuesday.  

It's the world's oldest known impact site, the new study said, one that also may have changed Earth's climate: It occurred at a time that coincided with Earth’s recovery from an ice age known as "Snowball Earth," where most of Earth’s surface was covered with ice sheets up to 3 miles thick, according to a statement from Imperial College in London.

The impact left behind a scar on the land that's known as the Yarrabubba impact crater. "The age we've got for the Yarrabubba impact structure makes it the oldest impact structure on the planet," study co-author Chris Kirkland, a geologist at Australia's Curtin University, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.“

[jasong]

Perhaps uncoincidentally, 2.2 billion years ago is also within the great oxygenation event which created the early banded iron formations due to the first life on Earth emerging and photosynthesizing oxygen from CO2. The Subury impact here was also at the end of that period. I wonder if a lot of the oceanic dissolved iron was sourced from dust from major meteorite impacts?

The only other BIF forming period on record is also during the only other "snowball earth" period (there were two of these) around 650 million years ago.

Odd how it's all kinda connected, life and meteorites. Makes me wonder if there is something to the theory that RNA, glucose, or other simple life building blocks hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite, and maybe the crustal iron arrived on our surface at the same time as the first life did, because they came in riding the same rocket.

[Steve Herschbach]

There is more evidence all the time regarding a little known field in geology called impact tectonics. We assume all the structures we see in the field are related to plate tectonics, but at least some wrinkling, compression, and fracturing of the earths crust has been created by massive meteorite or asteroid impacts.

http://www.impacttectonics.org

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003M%26PS...38.1093L/abstract

[Koeh]

The gold belt in Australia runs from Queensland though the centre of the Northern Territory then onto Western Australia,obviously there is other places where loads of gold has been found in Australia but where I mentioned runs nearly continuously