A new study using mineral dating of rocks in the Pilbara shows the Earth’s oldest crater is more than three billion years old.

In the Pilbara of Western Australia, some of Earth’s oldest rocks lie beneath the sky, as they have for billions of years. They are dark, weathered volcanic rocks, close to 3.5 billion years old, cut by veins and stewed by deep time.

Their survival is remarkable. Most rocks this old have moved back into Earth’s interior. These ones, still on the surface, have changed, but not enough to erase their first story. In places, they still preserve the rounded forms of pillow basalts – lava that erupted underwater and cooled on an ancient sea floor.

The same rock record also holds some of the earliest widely accepted evidence for life on Earth. Looking closely on some surfaces you find fine lines that fan through the rock. These are shatter cones – the frozen signature of a meteorite shock wave, and the clearest sign that something from space once struck Earth.

When our team first reported these rocks in 2025, we suggested they were part of an ancient impact crater at the ironically named North Pole Dome. But one question remained difficult: exactly how old was the impact?

In our new study, published in Geology, we used tiny mineral clocks inside the damaged rocks to show the impact most likely happened 3.024 billion years ago. That makes North Pole Dome the oldest known impact structure on Earth, and the only recognised impact crater from the Archean,........

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