Asteroid impact craters in India: How fireballs of the past shaped today’s Deccan Plateau

Amid talks of the Asteroid 2024 YR4’s slim chances of impacting India, one must be aware of how this subcontinent’s landscape bears scars of ancient cosmic collisions, with three confirmed asteroid impact craters offering clues to how asteroid impacts shaped its terrain, most notably contributing to the formation of the vast Deccan Plateau.

India’s Impact Craters: Windows to the Past

Lonar Crater: Formed 35,000–50,000 years ago by a meteorite collision, this 1.8 km-wide crater in Maharashtra is one of Earth’s few basaltic impact sites. Moreover, its saline-alkaline lake and maskelynite glass fragments- a mineral forged by extreme shockwaves, confirm its outer-space origin.

RISAT-1 RADAR image of the meteorite Impact crater near Lonar, Maharashtra. pic.twitter.com/CLpQ0UrK3a

— ISRO (@isro) August 23, 2014

Dhala Crater: Asia’s largest asteroid impact crater at 11 km wide, this 2.5-billion-year-old structure in present-day Madhya Pradesh reveals insights into early Earth’s bombardment history.

Shaped like a smudged pugmark of a tiger, the #Dhala crater of #MadhyaPradesh is estimated to have been created between 2.5 and 1.6 billion years ago and that when the collision occurred with a meteorite, life had just begun on Earth. pic.twitter.com/ahyoUSrE8n

— PeepulTreeWorld (@PeepulTreeWorld) May 4, 2018

Ramgarh Crater: Rajasthan’s 165-million-year-old, 10 km-wide crater features a central peak, a hallmark of high-energy impacts.

Ramgarh Crater, Baran pic.twitter.com/hnxOOwJtlC

— चिड़ी-कमेड़ी (@ChidiKamedi) August 24, 2023

To sum up, all these craters act as natural laboratories, helping scientists decode planetary surface processes and extreme ecosystems.

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The Chicxulub-Deccan Connection: A Double Catastrophe

Incidentally, India’s tryst with asteroids also goes back to the Chicxulub asteroid impact, 66 million years ago.

The asteroid, which wiped out 75% of Earth’s species including dinosaurs, struck Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Subsequently, seismic waves from the collision destabilized magma chambers beneath India, triggering one of Earth’s largest volcanic events.

Over the next 760,000 years, the Deccan Traps spewed 1.2 million cubic kilometres of lava, burying 500,000 square kilometres under basalt layers.

All of these then caused drastic climate swings such as volcanic winters from sulfur dioxide and long-term warming from Carbon dioxide, eventually reshaping ecosystems and solidifying the plateau’s foundation.

How Asteroid Impacts Shaped Modern India

Rice in Peninsular India

Rice is an import from the Gangetic plains in 1500 BCE to the Deccan Plateau. It reached further south by 500 BCE. Previous major staples were millets, wheat & barley. From Stevens et al. (2016), archaeobotanical data for sites in the south. pic.twitter.com/OCYBeyjrJg

— Ugra (@Ugra___) September 26, 2024

Born from the Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions, the Deccan Plateau’s mineral-rich basaltic layers now fuel India’s agriculture and industry.

Fertile soils support crops like cotton and sugarcane, while reserves of iron ore, coal, and mica drive economic growth. Additionally, the region’s biodiversity, including tigers and blackbuck, thrives in habitats shaped by ancient geological chaos.

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Monitoring Future Threats

While ancient impacts built India’s geology, modern agencies like ISRO now track near-Earth objects. The 340–450m asteroid Apophis, set to pass 32,000 km from Earth in 2029, exemplifies the need for vigilance against future cosmic threats.