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Craters

An impact crater is one of the sizes the mind refuses to hold. We picture a hole; the reality is a wound tens or hundreds of kilometres across. Each one here is drawn as a circle of its true diameter, with the worn remnant that survives today nested inside the original rim.

Drag a crater across the map and watch a single asteroid's mark balloon over whole countries — the same Mercator illusion that puffs up the north, told with a scar instead of a nation.

  • Vredefort: the largest verified impact crater on Earth

    About two billion years ago an asteroid an estimated 20–25 km across struck what is now the Free State of South Africa, blasting out a crater roughly 250–300 km wide — larger than the impact that ended the dinosaurs. Two billion years of erosion have since worn it down to the Vredefort Dome, a ~70 km ring of upturned rock and the largest verified impact structure on Earth.

    Vredefort Impact Structure · 70,686 km²

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