Gallery: Meteorite craters in Australia

Wolfe Creek Crater

Wolfe Creek meteorite crater, in northern Western Australia – the country’s best-known impact crater – was formed 300,000 years ago. The meteorite that caused the crater would have weighed more than 50,000 tonnes and is thought to have been travelling at 15km/second.

The crater would have been a lot deeper when it was first formed, but sand dunes on the eastern side have blown in a lot of sand and filled the crater somewhat.

Discovered by Europeans in just 1947, the crater was long known by traditional owners, who called it Kandimalal.

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Photo Credit: Dick and Pip Smith

A diagram of the main features of the Wolfe Creek crater in Western Australia. It is one of the world’s 18 known craters associated with a meteorite impact. During its violent formation, much of the rocks disappeared – being pulverised, vaporised or dispersed as a dust cloud.

An impact on the scale of Wolfe Creek is predicted to occur about once every 25,000 years. Extinction-level impacts may occur about once every 50-100 million years.

Veevers Crater

Discovered from the air during a government survey in July 1975 and named after an Australian geoscientist, the Veevers crater is located in Western Australia, between the Great Sandy and Gibson deserts. At 70m wide, it’s one of the best-preserved impact craters of its size in the world, although according to Geoscience Australia its origins remain speculative.

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve

About 4700 years ago, a meteor weighting several tonnes hurtled to Earth at 40,000km/h before fragmenting on impact. It left 12 craters that can today be explored at Henbury, south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. The largest of the craters is 180m wide and 15m deep. Thousands of iron-based meteorite fragments have been found in the vicinity, validating its classification as an impact crater.

In Australia, five craters have remnant meteorite fragments around them: Boxhole (NT), Dalgarana (WA), Henbury (NT), Veevers (WA) and Wolfe Creek (WA).

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

Shoemaker crater

The Shoemaker crater (formerly called the Teague Ring) is an impact crater in Western Australia, about 100km northeast of Wiluna. The 30km-wide crater could be 1.7 billion years old, and is regarded as Australia’s oldest-known impact structure.

There are 176 craters around the world that scientists consider to be meteorite ‘impact’ craters. Australia has 30 of them.

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

Acraman crater

This impact crater is in the Gawler Ranges in South Australia. There are thousands of circular structures on Earth, many of them formed by volcanic processes. Some of them, like the Acraman crater, are not near volcanic areas and don’t have volcanic rocks around them – ruling in the possibility of their formation by impact from objects like meteorites.

Tell-tale evidence includes: shallow, circular crater or features; certain types of minerals in the surrounding rocks being ‘shock’ affected, the presence of ‘shatter cones’; and the presence of a particular chemical signal from vaporised gases in the rocks.

The impact that caused Acraman crater is estimated to have occurred about 580 million years ago.

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

Piccaninny crater

The Piccaninny crater in Western Australia lies in the Purnululu (Bungle Bungle) National Park. The 7km-diameter crater is largely eroded so may have originally been larger. While the impact event has not been dated, the crater is thought to have formed less than 360 million years ago.

Since the Earth is almost three-quarters water, most meteorites hit the ocean. These missiles are often quite fragile, breaking up easily on impact and often tearing apart when they first hit the Earth’s atmosphere.

Photo Credit: Information edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

A schematic of the formation of a simple impact crater. When a massive object travelling at high speeds hits the ground, it punches a hole and pulverises and vaporises the rocks deep below the surface.

In a fraction of a second, that energy is converted to heat and a shock wave that melts the projectile and surrounding rock and blasts material out in every direction. This is why meteorites are rarely found within explosion craters.

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.

A map of craters around Australia. Of the 176 impact craters around the world, 30 are in Australia and five of those have meteorite fragments near them.

Photo Credit: Images and information are edited from Australia's Meteorite Craters by Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, published by the Western Australian Museum.