Qualla: Glikson Crater

Glikson Crater: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. There is almost nothing to look at. Stand in the Little Sandy Desert at the centre of the Glikson crater and you will see sand dunes, a scatter of broken sandstone, and the same red emptiness in every direction. The crater that gives the place its name is a ruin, scoured down over hundreds of millions of years until the bowl itself is gone. What gave it away was invisible. An aircraft trailing a magnetometer detected a near-perfect ring of magnetic anomaly, 14 kilometres across, etched into the rock beneath the sand. Something had once struck here hard enough to leave a mark that outlasted the crater that contained it.

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Glikson Crater: A Ring You Cannot See

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. The Glikson structure first surfaced not in a photograph but in an aeromagnetic survey, where a strikingly circular anomaly hinted at buried violence. Most of the site is smothered by dunes; only sparse outcrops of uplifted, deformed Neoproterozoic sandstone break the surface. Th...

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Glikson Crater: The Cones That Don't Lie

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. A circle in the magnetism is a clue, not a verdict. The proof came from the rocks themselves. Geologists found shatter cones, distinctive branching fractures that form only under the colossal, instantaneous pressure of an impact, alongside microscopic shock effects in the mineral...

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Glikson Crater: Reading the Age of a Ghost

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Huntster, Public domain. Dating an eroded crater means dating the rocks around it. Nearby dolerite has been measured at 508 million years old, with an uncertainty of about 5 million years either way, placing it in the Middle Cambrian. If that same igneous rock is the source of the magnetic ring, then the...

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Image: User:Huntster | Public domain

Glikson Crater: The Man and the Crater That Called Him

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. The structure carries the name of Andrew Glikson, an Australian geologist who graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1968 and spent a career hunting impacts across the continent, eventually counting dozens of proven and possible craters. A possible impact here was ...

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Image: NASA | Public domain