Qualla: Shoemaker Impact Structure

Shoemaker Impact Structure: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, Public domain. From the ground it is almost invisible, just low ridges and a scatter of salt pans in the flat red country north of Wiluna. From orbit it leaps out: a near-perfect bullseye more than 30 kilometres across, concentric rings of rock wrapped around a raised granite core, with seasonal salt lakes pooling in the grooves like silver in a fingerprint. This is the Shoemaker impact structure, the eroded stump of a crater gouged out of the Australian shield well over a billion years ago. It is the oldest impact scar known on the continent, and almost nothing about it makes sense until you see it from above.

Image: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team | Public domain

Shoemaker Impact Structure: Reading a Wound a Billion Years Old

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. An asteroid struck here in the deep Precambrian, with estimates ranging from roughly 1.6 to 1.7 billion years ago, when the only life on Earth was microbial and the land had no plants, no soil, no sound. The original crater was far larger and far deeper than what survives. More t...

Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain

Shoemaker Impact Structure: The Fingerprints of an Impact

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. For decades no one was sure what had made the ring. The first published suggestion that it might be an impact came in 1974, and proof followed when geologists found the unmistakable signatures of a hypervelocity strike. Shatter cones, distinctive rock fractures that radiate like ...

Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain

Shoemaker Impact Structure: Where Two Ancient Worlds Meet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. The crater sits on a geological seam, the boundary between the Archaean Yilgarn craton, a slab of crust among the oldest on Earth, and the younger Earaheedy Basin laid down on top of it. Lake Teague and a constellation of smaller salt lakes occupy the low ground of the rings, fil...

Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain

Shoemaker Impact Structure: The Man on the Moon

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. The crater was renamed for Eugene "Gene" Shoemaker, the American geologist who all but invented the study of impacts and co-discovered the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994. Shoemaker had dreamed of walking on the Moon as its first geologist, but Addison'...

Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain