El Elegante Crater
Cráter El Elegante
Interesting facts
- Its Spanish name means "the elegant one", fitting a crater whose outline is almost perfectly circular and which ranks among the largest maars in the world.
- Argon dating published in 2006 put the crater's age at about 32,000 years, far younger than an earlier estimate of roughly 149,000 years.
- A "bathtub ring" of pebbly lake sediments runs around the inner walls about 60 metres above the floor, marking the shoreline of the vanished lake.
- Radiocarbon dating of the old lake deposits on the crater floor has returned ages of at least 20,000 years.
- After the explosion, a small cinder cone grew on the south-central part of the crater floor.
- The steep inner walls expose stacked basalt lava flows, and the blanket of shattered rock around the rim is tilted and faulted in places.
- Geological fieldwork at the crater began in January 1968, and it has since become one of the best-studied maars in the Pinacate field.
Why it is worth it
El Elegante is a near-perfect circular pit in the volcanic desert of northwest Mexico: about 1.5 kilometres across and some 250 metres deep, its walls dropping in layered bands of rock to a flat floor that once held a lake. It is the largest crater of its kind in the Pinacate volcanic field, a dark expanse of lava flows, cinder cones and craters surrounded by the sand seas of the Gran Desierto de Altar in the Sonoran Desert.
The crater is a maar, born not from lava pouring out but from an explosion. Around 32,000 years ago, rising magma met groundwater beneath the desert floor; the water flashed into steam, and the sudden pressure blasted a huge hole through the overlying rock, scattering ash and shattered stone across the surrounding plain for up to about 30 kilometres. The material thrown out built the raised rim that stands above the desert today, and its successive layers can be traced in the crater walls. During the wetter period that followed the last glaciation, water collected on the crater floor as a lake.
El Elegante sits within El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013. The reserve combines a volcanic shield with extensive fields of active dunes and a remarkable concentration of maar craters, alongside other great pits such as Cerro Colorado, MacDougal and Sykes. The Pinacate volcanoes have erupted on and off for about four million years. The landscape is stark enough that NASA sent Apollo-era astronauts here between 1965 and 1970 to train for walking on the Moon. Desert bighorn sheep, Sonoran pronghorn, Gila monsters and desert tortoises are among the reserve's wildlife, and El Elegante is the crater most visited within it.
Getting there
The crater lies in the Pinacate reserve in Sonora, between the towns of Sonoyta (about 52 km away) and Puerto Peñasco (about 60 km), both in a straight line; access is by unpaved roads within the reserve. Puerto Peñasco has a small airport (PPE) about 56 km away. The nearest larger airports are Yuma International Airport (YUM) across the US border, about 145 km away, and Mexicali International Airport (MXL) in Mexico, about 195 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
El Elegante is a maar located in the Gran Desierto de Altar in the Sonoran Desert, Mexico.
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