Qualla: Woodleigh Impact Structure

Woodleigh Impact Structure: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is nothing to see. Stand on Woodleigh Station, east of Shark Bay in the Gascoyne, and you find low scrub, red earth, and the kind of horizon that goes on without interruption. Yet somewhere beneath your boots is the buried rim of a crater that may once have been up to 120 kilometres across, blasted into the planet by an asteroid or comet striking at unthinkable speed. The Woodleigh impact structure is one of the largest in Australia and among the biggest confirmed on Earth, and almost nobody noticed it for hundreds of millions of years. It took a drill, a gravity survey, and a stubborn geologist to find a crater hiding in plain sight.

Woodleigh Impact Structure: The Crater You Cannot See

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Because Woodleigh never breaks the surface, its true size remains genuinely uncertain, and that uncertainty has fuelled decades of scientific argument. The team that announced it in 2000 argued it might stretch up to 120 kilometres across. If that larger estimate holds, Woodleigh...

Woodleigh Impact Structure: Found by Accident, Confirmed by Doubt

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drilling first punched into that central uplift in the late 1970s, but no one understood what they had hit. The rock looked odd; the meaning did not land. Not until a 1997 gravity survey, which revealed a strange circular anomaly buried in the Carnarvon Basin, did the suspicion o...

Woodleigh Impact Structure: A Mineral Born Only in Catastrophe

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The clinching evidence came nearly two decades later. In 2018, researchers found reidite in a Woodleigh drill core, the first time the mineral had ever been identified in Australia and only around the sixth time anywhere on Earth. Reidite forms from ordinary zircon only under the...

Woodleigh Impact Structure: Did It Help End a World?

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years the impact was thought to be relatively young, somewhere between the Late Permian and Late Triassic. Newer dating pushes it far deeper into the past, to roughly 364 million years ago in the Late Devonian. That timing is provocative, because it falls close to the Late De...