Where Did Earth's Craters Go?

A fireball over Washington leaves no crater. On the Moon, a new one can last for billions of years. Earth is hit again and again. Most of the evidence does not stay where we can see it.

This is the first Science & Discovery film. It is not a Historic Minds episode. Historic Minds follows people, places, and events. This series starts with the phenomenon and follows the evidence.

The film is eight minutes and sixteen seconds. This page is the companion: the public claim of the cut, the chapters, and the sources named on screen.

Three clues

The film follows a fireball, a fresh lunar crater, and a nearly circular lake. A bright streak in the sky is not the same thing as a rock on the ground. The atmosphere stops most incoming objects. The Moon keeps impact scars that Earth erases.

Wind, rivers, glaciers, sediment, volcanoes, oceans, and plate tectonics bury or destroy the record. A circle is only a start. Shatter cones, shocked quartz, impact melt, and breccia are how a hidden structure is recognized.

The film also looks at Meteor Crater, the buried Chicxulub structure beneath the Yucatán, and NASA’s DART spacecraft, which struck the asteroid moon Dimorphos in 2022.

Chapters

• 0:00 — A fireball, a crater, and a lake
• 0:36 — Usually, no crater
• 1:32 — The Washington fireball
• 2:11 — The Moon remembers
• 3:18 — How Earth erases a scar
• 4:13 — A circle is not proof
• 5:23 — The Moon keeps the record
• 5:47 — Chicxulub, the rare one
• 6:29 — A spacecraft hits on purpose
• 6:59 — Earth makes us earn the proof

Sources named in the film

• NASA / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
• NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin, Landsat 8, U.S. Geological Survey
• NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, Landsat, U.S. Geological Survey (Meteor Crater)
• NASA/GSFC/LaRC / JPL-Caltech, MISR Team
• NASA/JPL, SRTM and Landsat (Chicxulub)
• NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (DART)
• U.S. Geological Survey, including Meteor Crater melt particles (Amber Gullikson), Valles Caldera (Mike Poland), Flynn Creek impact breccia, the Chesapeake Bay impact structure, and shocked quartz from the Langley core
• Wells Creek shatter cones, photo by Zamphuor, via Wikimedia Commons

A few shots are labeled in the film as AI-animated from a NASA or USGS source image. Those are derived motion, not original agency footage. Illustrations and artist reconstructions are labeled in the film and are not credited to NASA, USGS, or any other agency.

The Washington fireball data is NASA’s. The fireball pictures are reconstructions, not NASA footage. A longer note on the lunar crater is NASA found a 728-foot crater on the Moon.

Watch

• Series: Science & Discovery
• Film: Where Did Earth’s Craters Go?
• Playlist: Science & Discovery
• Shorts: Science & Discovery Shorts
• On this site: Watch
• Produced by JabMed AI Studios

This film is educational. It does not count hidden impact structures, and it is not a substitute for the NASA and USGS records it cites.