Led by Curtin University geologists Chris Kirkland and Tim Johnson, a research team unearthed this primeval crater beneath rock layers in the East Pilbara Terrane of Western Australia. The oldest Archaean crater before this discovery went back only 2.2 billion years.

Scientists published the discovery of a 3.5-billion-year-old meteorite impact crater, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years.

Scientists believe a newly-discovered crater believed to be the oldest in the world reveals a number of clues to the early days of life on Earth. A team of researchers at Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences,

About 252 million years ago, 80 to 90 percent of life on Earth was wiped out. In the Turpan-Hami Basin, life persisted and bounced back faster.

Even during one of Earth's largest mass extinction events, where heat waves kill of a majority of Earth's species, at least one oasis of survival existed. The findings suggest that there may have been pockets of protection throughout Earth - challenging the notion that the heat affected life on the planet uniformly,