A rocky stretch in Western Australia's Pilbara, near Earth's earliest-confirmed lifeforms, was hit by a meteorite about 3.5 billion years ago.

It was a respectable tenure, but the world’s oldest known meteorite site is no longer western Australia’s 2.2 billion-year-old, 43-mile-wide Yarrabubba crater. Researchers at Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) say the new recordholder is located about 660 miles north in the country’s Pilbara region.

We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years. Our discovery is published today in Nature Communications.

Researchers from Curtin University have found the world’s oldest known meteorite impact crater, hidden within the ancient rocks of the North Pole Dome in Western Australia’s P

Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest known meteorite impact crater. Located in Western Australia, the crater has been dated to about 3.5 billion years ago, at a time when these almost literally Earth-shattering events should have been occurring regularly.