The Spider in the Kimberley Is an Ancient Impact Scar

The Location

In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, a set of light-coloured ridges fans out like legs inside a much larger oval. A NASA Earth Observatory image published on 13 October 2026 shows Spider Crater as recorded by the NASA–USGS Landsat 9 satellite on 20 September. This is a new view of a known feature, not a newly discovered crater.

What's There

NASA puts the full eroded structure at roughly 13 by 11 kilometres; the spiderlike centre is about 4 kilometres across. The pale spokes are resistant sandstone ridges. Geologists interpret their arrangement as what remains of a central uplift: rock that rebounded upward after the original impact, then weathered for immense spans of time.

• Visible now: the pale radial pattern and its surrounding eroded rock in a satellite image.
• Field evidence: shatter cones in the central dome, fractures associated with extreme shock.
• Laboratory evidence: shock-deformed quartz and zircon studied in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

The History

Volcanism was once proposed as an explanation. Shatter cones and microscopic shock features instead support an impact origin. The crater is old enough that its original rim is not the crisp bowl people might expect from a recent strike. NASA reports a broad estimated impact age of 600–900 million years, inferred from regional rocks, rather than a precise dated moment.

The Mystery

What angle did the projectile take, and exactly when did it land? The quartz and zircon study examines asymmetrical shock deformation to constrain the impact geometry, but neither the satellite photograph nor the ridge pattern alone solves the date. The visible “spider” is a geological afterimage, shaped as much by erosion as by the blow itself.

The impact is gone. Its structure still shows through the landscape.