Five ordinary-looking places — a railroad stop, a walled market town, a farming dorp, a fishing village, a hamlet with one school and one shop — that all happen to stand on ground rearranged from space, from a 50,000-year-old bowl in the desert to a two-billion-year-old wound 300 km wide.
Barringer Crater, 30 km west of town, is the best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth. In 1960 Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao found coesite in its shattered sandstone — the first time that high-pressure mineral had ever been found in nature. It ended a fifty-year argument about the hole's origin and gave geologists the test they still use to confirm an impact site.
The Ries crater was cut 14.8 million years ago by an asteroid roughly 1.5 km across. The town sits near its centre, and St George's church with its 90 m 'Daniel' tower is built of suevite — an impact breccia carrying shocked quartz and microscopic diamonds. The basin was read as volcanic until 1960, when Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao found coesite in the suevite of the Otting quarry — and Shoemaker had been tipped off by the church itself, whose stonework he recognised as impact rock.
An asteroid perhaps 10–15 km wide struck here about 2.02 billion years ago and blasted a crater 250–300 km across, the largest confirmed on Earth. Erosion has since stripped the crater itself away, leaving only the granite dome that rebounded beneath the point of impact — and the same event helped fold and preserve the Witwatersrand basin whose gold built Johannesburg.
The 180 km crater buried beneath this village and the sea off it was made 66 million years ago by an asteroid some 10 km wide — the impact tied to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. It was spotted in the 1970s by Pemex geophysicists prospecting for oil, and the great arc of cenotes across the peninsula traces its buried rim at the surface.
An iron meteorite broke apart low over Saaremaa in the Bronze Age, most likely shortly after 1500 BC, and its fragments blasted nine craters: the main one 110 m wide and 22 m deep, plus eight smaller ones within a kilometre. It is one of the very few impacts to have struck an inhabited landscape — and in 2023 an arrowhead from a Swiss lake village, 1,600 km away, was analysed and found to be forged from iron that most likely fell right here.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.