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Earth’s Haunting Craters

Meteor Crater, Arizona 

• Meteor Crater, shown above, became the world’s first confirmed extraterrestrial impact crater when the famous planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker found the rare minerals stishovite and coesite, which only form during cosmic collisions or nuclear blasts, at the crater site in 1960. It was formed when an iron-rich asteroid about 160 feet in diameter smacked into the Arizona desert 40,000 years ago. 

Gosses Bluff, Northern Territory, Australia

• Gaz’s riveting, stark images make you wonder if you’re actually looking at Earth. In the image above, he turned the sky into a black, alien thing by using a red filter (in front of black and white film) when he shot the 14 mile-wide Gosses Bluff, which formed 142.5 million years ago.

Upheaval Dome, Utah 

• Such is the case at Upheaval Dome, shown above. Scientists have gone back and forth over whether the pummeled, uplifted rocks were abused by a salt dome that rose from below, or cosmic artillery from above. In 2008, researchers discovered the presence of shocked quartz (stishovite, or its close cousin coesite) in the dome, confirming its extraterrestrial origins.

New Quebec (aka Pingualuit) Crater, Quebec, Canada 

• Located in the treeless tundra of the Canadian Arctic, Pingualuit, shown above, certainly fits the “treasure” bill. Its almost perfectly round, 2.1 mile-wide rim encloses an isolated, crystal clear lake that plummets almost 900 feet to the crater floor. Local Inuits know the 1.4 million year-old dimple as the “Crystal Eye of Nunavik;” pretty impressive for a region strewn with pristine lakes and waterways.

Henbury, Northern Territory, Australia 

• Nothing could be more appropriate for Henbury, shown above. In a turn of tragic cosmic irony, the great crater hunter and legendary scientist Shoemaker — the one who put Meteor Crater on the map — died in a head-on collision with another car while driving outside Alice Springs, Australia in 1997, not far from Henbury.
  

Article by Michael Reilly. Images courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press 

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