Researchers believe an asteroid three times the size of the state of Rhode Island crashed into Earth 3.26 billion years ago; the (much smaller) asteroid that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs hit about 65 million years ago.
The gigantic asteroid would have left a 300-mile long crater in the Earth's crust, this is as far as the distance between New York City and Washington D.C., an American Geophysical Union news release reported.
In this event seismic waves stronger than any known earthquake would have shaken the Earth for up to half an hour in any location, leading to multiple tsunamis. The event is believed to have created geological features in regions of South Africa known as the Barberton greenstone belt.
The 23 to 36 mile-wide space rock would have collided with our planet at a breakneck speed of 12 miles per second.
"We knew it was big, but we didn't know how big," Donald Lowe, a geologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study, said in the news release.
This study may be the first to document an impact from this far back in the Earth's history. In the impact scenario the sky would have turned blood-red and the oceans would have boiled. The air would have been full of dust and vaporized rock.
The impact would not have been an anomaly at the time; researchers believe dozens of objects hit the Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment period, between two and three billion years ago.
Many of these impact sites have been destroyed through erosion over the billions of years, but some region of South Africa and Western Australia still hold some evidence of the events.
The researchers' model provides insight into "rock formations and crustal fractures" in the Barberton greenstone belt, which contains some of the oldest-known geological features on the planet.
"This is providing significant support for the idea that the impact may have been responsible for this major shift in tectonics," Frank Kyte, a geologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study, said in the news release.
The study could help researchers gain insight into the conditions of the very-young Earth.
"We are trying to understand the forces that shaped our planet early in its evolution and the environments in which life evolved," Lowe said.
