Terrestrial impact craters as sites of geo-political colonial relation: Terrestrial impact craters as sites of geo-political colonial relation

Our earth contains extensive evidence of astronomic bombardment in the form of terrestrial impact craters (Grieve 1990). Impact from an asteroid or cometary strike promotes cycles of excavation, burial, and reburial - a lithic churning of the subterranean and surface that confronts us with the ‘narrow province of the polity and the vast dominions of the inhuman’ (Clarke 2013, 2831). This presentation contrasts dramatic spectacles of cosmological ending (and beginning) that tend to frame our understandings of impact (Raynor and Veale 2023), with everyday routine colonial-capitalist material reorganizations of an impact’s aftermath e.g. through scientific imperialism, resource extraction, and tourism. The Ries and Rochechoruart craters in Germany and France, for instance, are quarried for their building stone, South Africa’s Vredfort impact structure is used amongst other things for agriculture and the dumping of sewage, and the Sudbury Basin in Canada produces more than $2 billion in nickel-copper sulphide each year. Alongside more well-known impact sites such as Meteor Crater Natural landmark in Winslow Arizona, Chicxulub Crater off the Yucatán Peninsula, and Stevns Klint World Heritage Site in Denmark, terrestrial impact craters provide us with an opportunity to reflect upon the complexities of territory, power and security amidst a jarring co-incidence of annihilation and utility.