A new study finds that a crater in Gujarat may have been caused by the largest meteorite to strike the planet in the last 50,000 years. At the time of impact, this meteorite could have caused a massive fireball, shockwaves, and wildfires that would have spread through the area where people from the Indus Valley civilization lived thousands of years ago. “It would have been definitely equivalent to a nuclear bomb, but without the radioactive fallout,” says Gordon Osinski at Western University in Canada to New Scientist, which reported on the study. The 1.8-kilometre-wide crater is called the Luna Structure and it has been known to locals in Gujarat for a long time. Geochemical analysis at the site showed a high proportion of iridium in the soil. This suggests that an iron meteorite probably impacted the site. Researchers also discovered other characteristic to meteors, like wüstite, kirschsteinite, hercynite and ulvöspinel. However, some scientists argue that while geochemical analysis could seem to match, it has not yet been conclusively proven that the Luna structure is a meteor crater. To do that, the researchers will need to find super-heated rocks that melted because of the energy of the impact. But if it indeed was a meteor impact, it would have created shockwaves that reached five kilometers away and wildfires that went even further. The dust thrown up by the meteor would have dimmed the Sun for many days in what is now Gujarat. The researchers dated the meteor impact to about 4,050 years ago.
