Impact event

Impact events are caused by the collision of large meteoroids, asteroids or comets (generically: bolides) with Earth and may sometimes be followed by mass extinctions of life. For discussion of impacts in general, not just on Earth, see impact crater.

Recent pre-historic impact events

In addition to the extremely large impacts that happen every few tens of millions of years, there are many smaller impacts that occur much more frequently but which leave correspondingly smaller traces behind. Due to the strong forces of erosion at work on Earth, only relatively recent examples of these smaller impacts are known. A few of the more famous or interesting examples are:

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• Barringer Crater, the first crater to be proven the result of an impact
• the Rio Cuarto craters, produced by an asteroid striking Earth at a very low angle
• the Wabar craters, which apparently formed within the past few hundred years
• the Noerdlinger Ries, a 24 km crater in Germany formed about 15 million years ago.