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# Oklahoma's Buried Crater Was Filed Under the Wrong Age
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/oklahomas-buried-crater-was-filed-under-the-wrong-age/
- Published: 2026-11-06T11:04:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T11:04:00.000Z
- Description: Fossils tied this impact to one era of cosmic bombardment. Buried crystals moved it into the middle of a mass extinction. What part it played there, the study left unsettled.
- Author: Deep Time
- Tags: Earth Sciences

A hole about 16 kilometers (10 miles) wide lies under the small town of Ames, Oklahoma, and nobody standing on it can see a thing. Its accepted age was off by roughly 100 million years, generous even by geological standards.

The rock that dug it was about as big as the Eiffel Tower and moving at upward of 110,000 km/h (70,000 mph). It came down in a shallow sea that covered the region, and sediment from the seafloor filled the wound. Only three U.S. impact structures are larger. Oil prospectors found this one by accident in 1991, when their drill went into it.

Marine fossils in and near the crater seemed to settle its age. They matched the Ordovician meteor event, roughly 467 million years back, a stretch when Earth absorbed an unusual barrage of big space rocks, likely pieces of one body that had broken apart.

Elizabeth Catlos, who studies Earth and other planets at the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues read fracture patterns inside zircon crystals buried in the structure. Zircon is a nearly indestructible mineral that records the heat and pressure it has survived. Whatever technique they tried, Catlos said, the answer came back younger. The crystals put the impact at 370 million years ago.

That lands it squarely inside the Frasnian-Famennian event, one of Earth's five great extinctions, when the oceans ran short of oxygen and up to half of the life in the sea vanished over several million years. The researchers insist the crater did not cause it. Its dust, they suggest, may have helped chill the air over the region.

The crystals kept the right date the whole time, sealed under a small Oklahoma town. How much the impact added to that slow die-off, the crystals could not say.

**Read the full story at** [Live Science, October 14, 2026](https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/one-of-americas-biggest-meteor-craters-is-100-million-years-younger-than-we-thought-and-coincided-with-a-global-extinction-event?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Geology dates a crater by interviewing its neighbors. At Ames, the fossils were honest witnesses to a sea some 97 million years older than the impact.