Qualla: Tookoonooka impact structure

Tookoonooka impact structure: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stand on the gibber plains north of Eromanga and there is nothing to see. No rim, no bowl, no scar - just flat, red, unremarkable outback running to a flat horizon. Yet somewhere beneath your boots, sealed under nearly a kilometre of rock, lies one of the largest impact craters on the Australian continent. Tookoonooka is an astrobleme, a "star wound," and it is utterly hidden. Up to sixty-six kilometres across, it was punched into the earth roughly 125 million years ago and then buried so completely that humanity had no idea it existed until oil prospectors went looking for something else entirely.

Tookoonooka impact structure: The Crater Nobody Could See

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tookoonooka was not found by an explorer or a geologist tramping the surface. It was found by sound. In the 1980s, seismic surveys shot across the Eromanga Basin in the hunt for petroleum returned a strange, ring-shaped disturbance deep in the rock, and in 1989 the structure was ...

Tookoonooka impact structure: An Impact into the Sea

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the meteorite fell, the Queensland outback did not exist. In its place lay the Eromanga Sea, a vast, shallow inland ocean that flooded much of the continent's interior during the Early Cretaceous. The impactor tore through that water and slammed into the seabed beneath, thro...

Tookoonooka impact structure: A Possible Double Strike

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tookoonooka may not have come alone. About three hundred kilometres away lies another buried ring of almost exactly the same age, known as Talundilly, and many scientists suspect the two were made in a single event - a binary impact, perhaps from an asteroid that split in two bef...

Tookoonooka impact structure: Wealth in the Wound

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is an irony buried with the crater. The very industry that discovered Tookoonooka now benefits from it: the shattered, fractured rock of the impact zone is associated with several small oil fields, the broken geology making natural traps for hydrocarbons. A cataclysm that w...