The Most Remarkable Impact Craters in the World
6 places in 5 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable impact craters in the world are Meteor Crater (United States), Wolfe Creek Crater (Australia) and Lonar Lake (India). The list covers 6 impact craters in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 2. Last updated 6 October 2026.
An impact crater records a single moment: a body from space striking the ground at many kilometres per second, releasing in an instant more energy than any volcano. What makes one remarkable is how clearly that moment can still be read. The best keep a sharp, raised rim and a near-perfect circle; others have been worn down over millions of years until only a ring of hills remains, and some hold lakes whose water has nowhere to come from but rain and snow.
Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert is the classic example, a bowl more than a kilometre wide that helped convince geologists that such craters come from impacts rather than volcanoes. Wolfe Creek in Western Australia rises as a ring from the flat outback, while Pingualuit in northern Quebec holds a round lake of exceptionally clear water. Tnorala in Australia's Northern Territory is the eroded heart of a far older and larger structure, sacred to the local Arrernte people, and Lonar in India is a rare crater blasted into basalt, now filled by a saline lake.
Each crater here was chosen for how it looks on the ground, and the list runs in order of beauty. Every place has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the collection can also be browsed country by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meteor Crater | Impact crater | United States | |
| 2 | Wolfe Creek Crater | Impact crater | Australia | |
| 3 | Lonar Lake | Impact crater | India | |
| 4 | Pingualuit Crater | Impact crater | Canada | |
| 5 | Tenoumer crater | Impact crater | Mauritania | |
| 6 | Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) | Impact crater | Australia |
01 Meteor Crater
United States · 29.8 km from Winslow35.028° N 111.023° W
Image by mattcaz from Pixabay Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, is the best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth, a bowl about 1,200 metres across and 170 metres deep in the high desert of northern Arizona. Its rim rises some 45 metres above the surrounding plain, and its outline is curiously squared off, a result of the joints that already cracked the rock layers when the impact came. The crater was punched out about 50,000 years ago, when the Colorado Plateau was cooler and wetter, a grassland with woods where mammoths and giant ground sloths roamed. The impactor was a nickel-iron meteorite about 50 metres wide, and its fragments are known as the Canyon Diablo meteorite.
Did you know? The impact released energy estimated at about 10 megatons of TNT, and recent modelling puts the meteorite's speed at roughly 12.8 km per second.
02 Wolfe Creek Crater
Australia19.172° S 127.796° E
Whinqinq Pom · CC BY-SA 2.0 At 880 meters across and almost perfectly circular, Wolfe Creek is one of the best-preserved impact craters anywhere on Earth — the kind of clean, textbook bowl shape that mostly survives only in places dry and geologically quiet enough not to erode it away. For decades scientists estimated the iron meteorite that punched it into the desert floor struck around 300,000 years ago; a 2019 study using two independent dating methods on rock and buried sand samples revised that dramatically, putting the real age closer to 120,000 years — younger than the site had been described for most of the twentieth century.
Did you know? The iron meteorite that made the crater is estimated to have been about 15 metres across and to have weighed around 14,000 tonnes.
03 Lonar Lake
India19.975° N 76.507° E
Pranabk · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the Deccan Plateau of Maharashtra, among flat fields of dark basalt soil, the ground suddenly drops into an almost perfectly round bowl about 1.8 km across and 150 metres deep. At the bottom lies a green, saline lake. Lonar is a meteorite impact crater — the only known impact crater on earth formed entirely in basalt, and the only crater lake of meteoritic origin in India.
Did you know? The lake was long taken for a volcanic crater; drill cores containing shatter cones and shock-transformed maskelynite glass finally proved a meteorite impact.
04 Pingualuit Crater
Canada61.278° N 73.664° W
NASA. Courtesy of Denis Sarrazin. · Public domain Pingualuit means roughly "where the land rises" in Inuktitut, and from the air that's exactly what it looks like: a raised rim standing 160 meters above the flat Nunavik tundra around it, ringing a crater more than 400 meters deep and 3.4 kilometers across, punched into the rock by a meteorite strike scientists date to about 1.4 million years ago — one of the older confirmed impact sites in North America.
Did you know? The only fish living in the crater lake is the Arctic char.
05 Tenoumer crater
Mauritania22.918° N 10.408° W
Michael Dennig · Public domain Tenoumer is one of those places that looks drawn with a compass. In the empty north of Mauritania, on a vast plain of Precambrian granite and gneiss, a ring of dark rock almost two kilometres across rises out of the tan and orange desert, so nearly circular that from orbit it seems stamped onto the landscape. The rim stands about 110 metres above the crater floor, and the space agencies that have photographed it describe it as one of the best-preserved impact craters on Earth.
Did you know? In 1949 the French geographer J. Richard-Molard described the 'Guelb Tenoumer' as an explosion crater in the western Sahara.
06 Tnorala (Gosse Bluff)
Gosses Bluff crater
Australia23.821° S 132.308° E
TerryT2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tnorala, better known as Gosse Bluff, is a ring of ridges rising about 180 metres out of the flat country west of Alice Springs, roughly five kilometres across and almost perfectly circular. From a distance it looks like a range of hills that has closed in on itself; from inside, the walls surround a sheltered, open basin. It is what remains of a cosmic collision: an asteroid or comet struck here about 142.5 million years ago, close to the boundary between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and blasted out a crater estimated at around 22 km across.
Did you know? Erosion since the impact has lowered the surrounding land by nearly 2,000 metres, which is why only the deep central core survives.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful impact crater in the world?
- On our list, Meteor Crater (United States) ranks first, followed by Wolfe Creek Crater (Australia) and Lonar Lake (India).
- Which country has the most impact craters?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (2), Canada (1) and India (1). Across the world, the continent's old, stable and dry surface preserves craters unusually well.
- How can you tell an impact crater from a volcanic crater?
- Impact craters show signs of a sudden shock that volcanoes cannot produce, such as shocked quartz, shatter cones and fragments of the meteorite itself. Their shape is also different: a raised, overturned rim around a floor that usually lies below the surrounding ground.
- How many impact craters are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 impact craters in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 2.