Fig. 1: Geological maps and stratigraphy.

a Geological map of a (northeastern) part of the Moon around the Atlas crater (from ref. ⁴¹), a complex impact structure with a heavily fractured crater floor and a central peak complex⁴². The grey areas are the regolith-covered ancient (Hadean) anorthosite flotation crust. The pink units are approximately 3.6 Ga basalts of comparable age to the oldest basalts in the Pilbara Craton. b Simplified geological map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT), Western Australia, comprising mostly Paleoarchaean granite domes and intervening greenstone belts, at the centre of which is the North Pole Dome. The EPT is about the same size as the ≤3.6 Ga Atlas crater in (a). c Geological map of the North Pole Dome showing the location of the studied stratigraphic section (red star). The ACM follows the boundary between the lower and upper Mount Ada Basalt, and the dashed black line where spherules have been found^24,25. Panels (b, c) adapted from the Geological Survey of Western Australia under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (see: https://dasc.dmirs.wa.gov.au/).