The wound in the earth — the world's oldest and largest meteorite impact crater, two billion years in the making
The Vredefort Dome is the visible remains of the world's largest and oldest confirmed meteorite impact structure — a crater (the Vredefort crater) approximately 300km in diameter, formed 2.023 billion years ago when a meteorite 10-15km in diameter struck the Kaapvaal Craton of what is now the Free State and Gauteng provinces of South Africa. The impact was approximately 10 billion times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The visible Dome (the central uplift, geologically inverted rock layers pushed up by the impact rebound) straddles the town of Parys on the Vaal River, 120km south…
The Vredefort impact occurred 2.023 billion years ago in the Paleoproterozoic era, when the Earth's atmosphere had no oxygen and photosynthetic life was only beginning to transform the oceans. The shock metamorphism from the impact created shatter cones (distinctive striated cone-shaped fractures in rock) visible today on the Vaal riverbank near Parys — the clearest physical evidence of the impact preserved at the surface. The impact's role in concentrating the Witwatersrand gold reefs (which subsequently drove the Anglo-Boer War, the formation of South Africa, and a century of mining history…