Gosse Bluff, an astonishing natural wonder, is a massive, rock-rimmed crater gouged out by the impact of a comet one hundred and thirty million years ago. The comet, a ball of frozen carbon dioxide, ice and dust measuring six hundred meters across became a flaming furnace as it hurtled to Earth.

Although entering only about eight hundred meters into the ground, it blew up almost four hundred square kilometers of nearby land. This astonishing site was created by a meteorite impact close to eight million years ago whereby its size was reduced to the erosion. Located on the vast Tnorala Conservation Reserve, this impact crater is called Tnorala by the Aborigines.

Gosse Bluff, discovered by Edmund Gosse in 1873, is the core of a crater that has worn away over one hundred and thirty millions years. From the original twenty kilometers in diameter, it measures only four kilometers presently. Erosion has worn away tons of debris that once covered it. The bluff, the crater's double-walled rim of hard sandstone crags, now rises to one hundred and eighty meters above the plain. This sandstone was pushed up by the explosion as layers of similar rock have been discovered over two kilometers beneath the surface.

One of the most extraordinary photos seen is pictured by space satellite whereby it looks like a massive thumbprint on the otherwise flat and featureless Missionary Plain one hundred and sixty kilometers west of Alice Springs. The main crowd puller here is that the sandstone ring stands out as one of the most impressive impact scars in a landscape littered with meteor craters. Located nearby Gosse Bluff are the Henbury Craters, made by twelve fragments of a meteorite that split as it hurtled in from space less than five thousand years ago.

credited to aguidetoasia and flickr: ccbg