orecastWalk through Nördlingen and you're standing inside a crater. The town lies in the Nördlinger Ries, a near-circular basin roughly 24 kilometres across in Bavaria. It formed almost fifteen million years ago, when a body about a kilometre wide slammed into the ground at over 70,000 kilometres per hour. UNESCO calls the Ries today Europe's best-preserved meteorite crater, and historically, it was only the second crater on Earth ever recognized as an impact site, after Arizona's Barringer Crater.
For a long time, geologists assumed the Ries was volcanic. The rock used to build much of the town (including the famous tower of St. George's Church, affectionately nicknamed "Daniel") seemed to fit that story: a light, porous stone called suevite. It wasn't until 1960 that geologist Eugene Shoemaker realized this rock couldn't have formed volcanically at all: only the extreme pressure of an impact could explain it.
The proof came from a quarry, not the church wall
The actual scientific confirmation didn't come directly from the church tower, but from the Otting quarry within the Ries. There, mineralogist Edward Chao analyzed the rock in his lab and found coesite, a form of silicon dioxide that only forms under the extreme pressures generated by a meteorite impact. Chao published his findings in October 1961. That settled it: the Ries is an impact crater, and Nördlingen's building material is fossilized cosmic violence.
The story gets an extra twist through Shoemaker himself. He played a key role in shaping NASA's astronaut training program and brought Apollo astronauts to the Ries for field exercises. A decade after he'd first questioned the crater's volcanic origin there, the same quarry hosted the men who would soon walk on the Moon. Shoemaker himself never made it into space during his lifetime. After his death, some of his ashes were carried to the Moon aboard a lunar probe. He remains the only person whose remains rest there.
Debris reaching all the way to Bohemia
The impact was powerful enough to hurl material far beyond the crater itself. Molten rock from the collision now exists as green glass, known as moldavites, in southern Bohemia, roughly 293 kilometres away. Ejecta has also been identified in a ravine in Switzerland, 181 kilometres from the Ries. The exact extent of the ejecta field and finer details of the impact sequence are still debated among researchers, as are small discrepancies in the crater's diameter and age depending on the method and study used.
If you want to see exactly where the crater rim runs and which sites you can still visit today, check the map on orecast.app.