02/06/2026
The Impact that made Moldavite (Nördlinger Ries) ☄️
Fourteen-point-eight million years ago, a roughly one-kilometre-wide asteroid slammed into what is now southern Germany.
The impact released energy measured in millions of nuclear bombs, excavated a crater nearly 24 kilometres wide, transformed bedrock into exotic high-pressure minerals, created microscopic diamonds... and blasted molten Earth material hundreds of kilometres through the atmosphere.
That molten debris cooled into a strange green natural glass known today as moldavite.
In this episode, we follow the evidence from the Nördlinger Ries crater itself, through the violent physics of asteroid impacts, the formation of suevite, shocked quartz, coesite and stishovite, and the remarkable chain of events that produced one of the world's most famous impact glasses.
No crystal healing.
No mystical energies.
Just geology behaving with absolutely no regard for moderation.
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Topics covered:
• The Nördlinger Ries impact crater
• Asteroid impact physics
• Crater formation processes
• Suevite and impact breccias
• Shocked quartz
• Coesite and stishovite
• Impact-generated diamonds
• Moldavite formation
• Tektites and ejecta fields
• The geological history of Europe
• How scientists proved the crater was caused by an asteroid
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Sources include peer-reviewed geological research, impact crater studies, mineralogical analyses and current scientific understanding of the Ries impact structure and associated moldavite strewn field.
If you enjoy evidence-based geology, deep time, planetary catastrophes and the occasionally absurd ways our planet operates, consider subscribing.
Because sometimes a pretty green stone turns out to be the fossilised remains of a very bad day for Miocene Germany.
