{"id":722369,"date":"2026-08-01T07:20:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T07:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/722369\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T07:20:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T07:20:36","slug":"smash-earths-impact-scars-reveal-the-history-of-asteroid-strikes-on-our-planet-here-are-some-of-the-most-impressive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/722369\/","title":{"rendered":"Smash! Earth’s impact scars reveal the history of asteroid strikes on our planet. Here are some of the most impressive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Impact craters are some of the most striking features visible on the surfaces of the rocky bodies
in our Solar System.<\/p>\n

Indeed, almost wherever we look on some of them, we see distinctive, circular craters as a record of impacts from rocky debris in ages past.<\/p>\n

So can we see craters on Earth? The answer is yes \u2013 but we have only a few of them.<\/p>\n

\"Artist'sCredit: Puchan \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

Today, there are only 190\u2013200 accepted impact craters with remains that can be located.<\/p>\n

Contrast that number with the Moon: it has around 1.3 million craters with a diameter of over 1km (0.6 miles).<\/p>\n

When you include estimates for craters with a diameter over 10 metres, that number mushrooms to around 500 million. Indeed, around 80% of the Moon\u2019s surface is covered in craters.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe South Pole-Aitken basin is the largest crater on Earth’s Moon. Credit: NASA\/GSFC\/Arizona State University
\nWhy Earth doesn’t have many craters<\/p>\n

In part, we have our atmosphere to thank for our planet\u2019s small crater count.<\/p>\n

Small space objects of around 1cm (0.4 inches) or less that arrive on a collision course with Earth burn up as shooting stars in the thick, gaseous envelope that surrounds our planet; slightly larger objects are
slowed down and fall as meteorites that lack the energy to create craters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This means that Earth doesn\u2019t have very small craters, only big ones.<\/p>\n

Only bodies at least 20\u201350 metres (65\u2013164ft) across can force their way through Earth\u2019s protective atmosphere and strike the ground at high speed, typically 54,000\u201372,000km\/h (33,500\u201344,700mph).<\/p>\n

The results are dramatic \u2013 impacts of this size produce craters with a diameter about 20 times that of the impactor, making even the smallest craters around 1km (0.6 miles) across.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TheThe region surrounding India’s Luna impact crater, the white mark in the centre of the image. NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.<\/p>\n

Other factors come into play to keep Earth\u2019s crater count low.<\/p>\n

We know from elsewhere in the Solar System that fresh craters typically have a circular rim wall and a bowl-shaped interior.<\/p>\n

However, on our planet, the constant activity of the surface (as well as the atmosphere) over time erodes crater walls and fills in floors.<\/p>\n

Some even become buried and are only evident today from seismic and geological surveys.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then there are large impacts that occurred in water. In shallower water, these may have produced a crater on the ocean floor, but these can\u2019t be seen from the surface.<\/p>\n

If the water was deep enough, no permanent crater would be made at all.<\/p>\n

Some craters are so eroded that they are lost altogether, by glacial action for example, or even by plate tectonics, when the continental plates they stand on are subducted.<\/p>\n

In fact, Earth\u2019s surface is subjected to so many natural processes that even its big craters are hard to spot.<\/p>\n

If you saw a rim wall around a bowl-shaped geological feature, how would you even know it was an impact crater?<\/p>\n

\"Artist'sArtist’s impression of an impact on Earth. Credit: \tANDRZEJ WOJCICKI \/ Getty Images
\nFinding Earth’s impact craters<\/p>\n

The idea that large rocks could hit Earth at speed took a long time to become accepted by scientists, even though smaller meteorites had been studied for several centuries.<\/p>\n

It was only after we entered the atomic age that true identification of an impact\u2019s origin became possible. Ironically, this was due to atomic weapons testing.<\/p>\n

At test sites, the rock endured extremely high shock pressures and some were afterwards found to have been altered.<\/p>\n

Patterns of deformation features were seen in individual grains in rocks and some grains changed their structure (the relative spacing of their component molecules) to produce what are called polymorphs.<\/p>\n

Once these metamorphic shock features were understood, they were used to positively diagnose shock events in the geological record, such as impact craters.<\/p>\n

So what do typical craters on Earth look like, where are they and can they be visited? To answer those questions, here\u2019s an overview of some of the most impressive craters we know of today.<\/p>\n

Barringer crater
\n\"BarringerBarringer meteor crater in Arizona, USA. Image courtesy Jet Propulsion Laboratory Planetary Photojournal<\/p>\n

The first accepted impact crater was the Barringer crater in Arizona, USA. However, its scientific origin was originally assigned as volcanic.<\/p>\n

Then, at the start of the 20th century, the idea of an impact origin by a giant meteorite was proposed (indeed, it is often now known as Meteor Crater).<\/p>\n

Eventually, shock metamorphic features were found in rocks from the site and it was unambiguously accepted as an impact crater.<\/p>\n

Barringer measures about 1.2km (0.7 miles) in diameter, with a rim wall some 45 metres (147ft) high and an interior that is 170 metres (558ft) deep.<\/p>\n

The crater is privately owned and allows visitors. It\u2019s a 45-minute drive east of Flagstaff, Arizona, and the entry fee gets you a guided tour of the crater floor, plus access to the museum and inevitable gift shop.<\/p>\n

N\u00f6rdlinger Ries crater
\n\"N\u00f6rdlinger<\/p>\n

Turning to Europe, we have the N\u00f6rdlinger Ries crater \u2013 24km (15 miles) across and 15 million years old
\u2013 that lies in western Bavaria, Germany.<\/p>\n

The town of N\u00f6rdlingen actually sits inside the crater, where there is a museum and the start of a hiking trail.<\/p>\n

Indeed, you can go up the tower of a local church and when you look out, in every direction you see the rim wall of the crater.<\/p>\n

One unusual feature of this crater is that the local rocks contain very small diamonds, typically less than 0.1mm (0.004 inches) in size, formed by the high pressure of the impact process squeezing the carbon in the local rocks into microscopic diamonds.<\/p>\n

Popigai crater
\n\"PopigaiPopigai crater, captured by a Landsat satellite<\/p>\n

This crater in Siberia, Russia is roughly 100km (62 miles) wide and 35 million years old.<\/p>\n

Just like the N\u00f6rdlinger Ries crater in Germany, carbon at the impact site (originally in the form of graphite in the local rocks) was shocked to form diamonds.<\/p>\n

Here, the diamonds are bigger than those found at N\u00f6rdlinger Ries, up to several millimetres in size.<\/p>\n

However, they are not of gem-like quality, so no fortunes are to be made there, even though they are thought to be present in large quantities.<\/p>\n

Manicouagan crater
\n\"ManicouaganManicouagan Crater, photographed by an astronaut on board the International Space Station. Credit: NASA<\/p>\n

This crater in Quebec, Canada formed around 215 million years ago. It was about 100km (62 miles) across originally, but today the heavily eroded remains are only around 72km (45 miles) across.<\/p>\n

As a large impact structure, it has several ring walls around it and a central uplift in the middle, where the interior of Earth rebounded after the initial crater shape was blasted deep into Earth\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, two local rivers, each of which originally flowed in an arc around the edges of the crater, were dammed to form a combined circle, marking out the crater shape. <\/p>\n

The resulting ring-shaped reservoir is easily visible from space.<\/p>\n

Mj\u00f8lnir crater
\n\"TheThe location of Mj\u00f8lnir crater. Credit: Dimitris66 \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

This is one you can visit, but you won\u2019t see \u2013 it lies underwater.<\/p>\n

Located in the Barents Sea off Norway, this ocean-floor crater is about 40km (25 miles) in diameter and some 142 million years old.<\/p>\n

Evidence for a large-impact-induced tsunami associated with this crater has been discovered along the Norwegian and Greenland coasts, showing the potential far reach of such an impact event.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chicxulub crater
\n\"AAn illustration showing the location of the Chicxulub crater, shortly after its formation. The Chicxulub crater is thought to be the impact scar left over from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and other species on Earth. Credit: Mark Garlick \/ Science Photo Library<\/p>\n

A more impressive submerged impact is the one off the modern Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula in Mexico.<\/p>\n

An impact there some 66 million years ago resulted not only in the Chicxulub crater<\/a> (which was originally some 150\u2013200km or 93\u2013124 miles wide), but also produced worldwide devastation via a global tsunami.<\/p>\n

The vast amount of rocky ejecta, water vapour and gases it sent into the atmosphere then spread across the planet.<\/p>\n

The result was a global mass-extinction event, the fall of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vredefort structure
\n\"TheThe Vredefort Crater, the world\u2019s oldest and largest known impact structure. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever been to Johannesburg, South Africa, you will have visited an impact site \u2013 perhaps without realising it.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s largest city stands in the Vredefort impact structure, some two billion years old and originally 250\u2013300km (155\u2013186 miles) across.<\/p>\n

Today, it is so heavily eroded it can only be seen in the geological maps of the region.<\/p>\n

Indeed, even if it were fully visible, it would be so big that anyone standing on the ground would not be able to discern its structure.<\/p>\n

It remains an oddity that even if barely visible on the ground, many craters stand out clearly when viewed from the air and even from space.<\/p>\n

Chesapeake Bay structure
\n\"LocationLocation of the Chesapeake Bay structure. Credit: Wiki CC BY-SA 3.0<\/p>\n

Another of these giant impact sites is the Chesapeake Bay impact structure, which is around 85km (53 miles) across and 35 million years old.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s capital city, Washington DC, about 200km (124 miles) away, lies very close to this giant impact crater.<\/p>\n

But like the Vredefort structure in South Africa, when you visit, you won\u2019t see anything: the structure is too big and too old, and has been eroded or buried.<\/p>\n

\"BiggestCredit: SciePro \/ Getty Images
\nThe age of Earth’s impacts<\/p>\n

All impact craters on Earth are noteworthy in their own way.<\/p>\n

The oldest, at 2.2 billion years old, is the highly eroded Yarrabubba structure in Western Australia, which was originally around 70km (43 miles) in diameter.<\/p>\n

Until recently, the youngest was believed to be the 1.85km-wide (1.15-mile) Yilan crater in China, at just 49,000 years old.<\/p>\n

But in 2025, shock metamorphic features were found in rocks in the Jinlin crater, also in China, confirming it as an impact crater.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s small at only about 0.9km (0.5 miles) across and its age is estimated at between 4,000 and 11,000 years old \u2013 making it a truly young crater, if confirmed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Together, all these craters are traces of our connection to the Solar System \u2013 scars being steadily smoothed and hidden by our ever-changing planet. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Impact craters are some of the most striking features visible on the surfaces of the rocky bodiesin our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":722370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-722369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}