When it comes to impact craters, Earth is the pauper of the solar system.
Even with a recent, still-to-be-confirmed crater discovery under Greenland’s ice, there are fewer than 200 known impact craters on the planet. Mars, for comparison, has hundreds of thousands.
Produced by falling space rocks, most impact craters on Earth have been wiped away over time by wind, rain, shifting ice and the crawl of tectonic plates. Here are the 190 confirmed survivors, as recorded in the Earth Impact Database, maintained by the University of New Brunswick in Canada — plus the newcomer in Greenland.
Identifying and studying such features could give scientists clues about the history of Earth, including the evolution of life itself. Researchers have tried to link various craters to the five known mass extinctions, for example. But only the space rock that created Chicxulub, hidden under Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico, is widely accepted as causing a major die-off. That space rock left a crater 150 kilometers wide and may have done in the dinosaurs and many other creatures about 66 million years ago (SN: 2/4/17, p. 16).