Qualla: Hickman Crater

Hickman Crater: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Arthur Hickman was not looking for a crater. A government geologist with decades in the Western Australian outback, he was idly panning across the Pilbara on Google Earth one day in July 2007 when a circle stopped him cold. It was too round to be a hill, too symmetrical to be a quarry, ringed by a raised rim that the desert had spent tens of thousands of years failing to erase. He had flown over this country, driven through it, mapped it. Yet here was a scar from space that nobody had ever named, sitting 35 kilometres north of Newman, revealed at last by a free program and a satellite's indifferent eye.

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Hickman Crater: The Circle in the Spinifex

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the ground, the Hickman Crater barely announces itself. It is only about 260 metres across and 30 metres deep, a shallow bowl punched into the ancient banded ironstone of the Ophthalmia Range. Spinifex creeps up its slopes. Rainwater pools at its centre after the rare downpo...

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Hickman Crater: Asking the Sky for a Second Opinion

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A hunch is not a discovery. Hickman emailed his satellite images to Andrew Glikson, an impact specialist at the Australian National University, for an expert eye. Glikson came to inspect the site in person, and the field evidence convinced him: this was the real thing. Chemists l...

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Hickman Crater: Fifty Thousand Years, Give or Take

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dating a hole in the desert is its own puzzle. Early estimates put the impact somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago, a span too wide to satisfy anyone. Argon dating of the glass forged in the collision's heat narrowed it down: roughly 50,000 years. That places the strike...

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Hickman Crater: A Discovery for the Satellite Age

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is something fitting about how the Hickman Crater entered the record. For most of human history, finding an impact crater meant stumbling onto it, or piecing it together from scattered rocks and a trained imagination. Hickman found his from a desk, the way a new generation ...

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