An Impact Structure With Legs

What happened

The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 9 satellite captured this image of the crater on September 20, 2026. Geologists believe the unusual arachnoid pattern is the remnant of a central uplift , the raised portion of the crater floor that formed in the rebound of the initial impact shock.

If the thought of extraterrestrial objects crashing into Earth weren’t creepy enough, behold Australia’s Spider Crater. From above, the mere appearance of a curious geologic feature in Western Australia is enough to cause a fright.

The aptly named Spider Crater, the product of a meteorite impact followed by hundreds of millions of years of erosion, sprawls across the landscape in the country’s Kimberley region . The full impact structure has an oval shape measuring about 13 kilometers by 11 kilometers (8 miles by 7 miles), with the spiderlike central portion measuring about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) across.