A Buried Oklahoma Crater Was Dated to the Wrong Era—and It Actually Lines Up With a Mass Extinction
In 1991, an oil company discovered a giant crater buried under Ames, Oklahoma. Subsequent investigations led researchers to propose the meteor responsible for the structure belonged to the many meteors that struck North America some 470 million years ago. New dating, however, challenges this account—while proposing an entirely different context for this enigmatic crater.
- ▪In 1991, an oil company discovered a giant crater buried under Ames, Oklahoma.
- ▪Subsequent investigations led researchers to propose the meteor responsible for the structure belonged to the many meteors that struck North America some 470 million years ago.
- ▪New dating, however, challenges this account—while proposing an entirely different context for this enigmatic crater.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/a-buried-oklahoma-crater-was-dated-to-the-wrong-era-and-it-actually-lines-up-with-a-mass-extinction-2000818870 |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:05:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T16:07:02.596Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T16:07:02.596Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | I4G-k-4zHGwa · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In 1991, an oil company discovered a giant crater buried under Ames, Oklahoma. Subsequent investigations led researchers to propose the meteor responsible for the structure belonged to the many meteors that struck North America some 470 million years ago. New dating, however, challenges this account—while proposing an entirely different context for this enigmatic crater. According to a recently published study in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, researchers dated zircon crystals from the site and found that the Ames crater likely formed about 370 million years ago, during the Late Devonian. That represents a whopping 100-million-year gap with the Ordovician meteor event, when Earth saw a large increase in meteor events roughly 467 million years ago.
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