Wolfe Creek Crater
Interesting facts
- The iron meteorite that made the crater is estimated to have been about 15 metres across and to have weighed around 14,000 tonnes.
- Rounded 'shale-balls' of iron oxide, the rusted remains of meteoritic iron, have been found around the crater, some weighing up to 250 kg.
- Wolfe Creek is often ranked as the second least eroded meteorite crater known on Earth, after Arizona's Barringer Crater.
- From the rim down to today's sandy floor the crater is about 60 metres deep.
- The name comes from a nearby creek honouring Robert Wolfe, a prospector and storekeeper of the Halls Creek gold rush; early papers misspelled it Wolf Creek.
- After the 1947 aerial sighting, a ground party reached the crater two months later, and the first scientific description appeared in 1949.
- In Djaru tradition one rainbow snake shaped the round crater while a second snake carved the nearby Sturt Creek.
- The crater gave its name and setting to the 2005 Australian horror film Wolf Creek and its 2013 sequel.
- Crime writer Arthur Upfield set his 1962 detective novel The Will of the Tribe at the crater.
Why it is worth it
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.
Europeans only found the crater by accident, spotting it from the air in 1947 during a survey flight. Aboriginal people in the region had known it for a great deal longer. In the Djaru language it's called Kandimalal, and it appears in Dreaming stories about a pair of rainbow snakes crossing the desert — one of which is said to have burst up out of the ground at this spot, forming the circular crater as it emerged.
What makes that story more than folklore is a detail recorded in 1999: elders' songs about the crater reference a star falling from the sky and burying itself in the earth — a description that lines up with the crater's real origin as a meteorite impact, passed down in oral tradition apparently long before anyone with a written record connected the site to space rock at all.
Getting there
811 km from Darwin. Fitzroy Crossing Airport (FIZ) is about 260 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Wolfe Creek Crater is a well-preserved meteorite impact crater (astrobleme) in Western Australia.
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