# A Hundred Times Rarer

The Moon has 5,185 confirmed impact craters wider than 20 kilometres. Earth, despite taking impacts at a higher density per square kilometre through gravitational focusing, has only 52. The gap comes from active geology: more than 70% of Earth is ocean, recycled through subduction in roughly 200 million years, and on the continents wind, rain and shifting tectonic plates erase impact features over tens or hundreds of millions of years. On the Moon, with no atmosphere, water or tectonics, a crater stays almost unchanged for billions of years.

The oldest confirmed crater on Earth, Yarrabubba (Australia), is 2.229 billion years old. The largest, Vredefort (South Africa), is 160 km wide and 2.023 billion years old. Chicxulub (Mexico), 66.051 million years old, is linked to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.

The page includes an interactive explorer with 70 confirmed craters that have published coordinates, filterable by age and diameter.

Sources: Earth Impact Database (Planetary and Space Science Centre, University of New Brunswick); Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter observations (NASA); Le Feuvre and Wieczorek (2011, *Icarus*); Erickson and colleagues (2020, *Nature Communications*).

Full version: https://mariuscomper.uk/craterele-sterse/en/