Qualla: Dalgaranga crater

Dalgaranga crater: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It would fit inside a tennis court. At just 24 metres across and three metres deep, the Dalgaranga crater is so small that you could walk its rim in under a minute, and so unremarkable to the casual eye that for centuries no one thought twice about it. Yet this shallow bowl in the red dirt northwest of Mount Magnet is one of the rarest impact sites on the planet. It is Australia's smallest known crater, and the only one anywhere confirmed to have been punched by a meteorite of its particular type. A small hole in the ground, it turns out, can be one of a kind.

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Dalgaranga crater: The Stockman's Hole

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The crater was found in 1921 by an Aboriginal stockman named Billy Seward, working the Dalgaranga pastoral station. He led the station manager, Gerard Wellard, to the spot, and Wellard soon turned up the strange dark fragments scattered around it. It took until 1923 for samples t...

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Dalgaranga crater: A Meteorite Like No Other

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What makes Dalgaranga extraordinary is what hit it. The fragments around the rim are mesosiderite, a rare stony-iron meteorite that mixes silicate rock and metal in roughly equal measure, the wreckage of a violent collision between two very different bodies somewhere in the early...

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Dalgaranga crater: Young Scar, Ancient Ground

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The crater is geologically fresh, which is exactly why it survives. Across most of the world a dent this shallow would have been erased by weather and time within a few thousand years. Here it persists, the meteorite fragments still lying where they fell rather than rusted away t...

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Dalgaranga crater: The Smallest of the Small

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dalgaranga's claim to being Australia's tiniest impact crater comes with one careful caveat: a handful of the smallest pits in the Northern Territory's Henbury crater field are smaller still. But Henbury was made by an ordinary iron meteorite that broke apart and gouged a whole c...

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Dalgaranga crater: Reading a Crater

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why does a 24-metre hole matter to science? Because small, fresh, well-preserved craters are rare laboratories. Most impacts of this scale are quickly buried or eroded, so the ones that endure let researchers study how a low-angle strike throws out its ejecta and shapes the groun...

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