Geological Wonder as a Sacred Landscape: The Case of Lonar Crater

Many places around the world celebrate unique geological formations or natural phenomena by associating them with divinity. In India, Lonar, one of the world’s largest terrestrial impact craters, is considered a holy site and is the locus of several temples. It is one of the few hyper-velocity impact craters in basaltic rock. The natural history of the formation of the crater and the cultural history of how it has been perceived by humans can be seen at this site. Geological processes take extremely long, and the scale is often in tens of thousands or even millions of years. The Pleistocene Epoch was the geological age that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, and it was in this period that a meteorite collision impact created a large depression in the ground at Lonar. Situated in the Deccan plateau region of India, in the modern state of Maharashtra, Lonar has one of the very few and well-preserved terrestrial impact craters in the world. The site has been an important subject of study because the geomorphology and hydrology of the crater are similar to other planetary bodies, especially Mars.1 Prior to the knowledge of the Lonar crater being the result of a meteorite impact, it was misunderstood as the outcome of a volcanic eruption ─ especially because the crater is in the volcanic basalt plateau. This perspective changed in the late twentieth century when studies proved the impact features and minerals were formed due to a meteor impact, and were not the result of a volcanic eruption.2