Archives of impact: The politics of craters on Earth

Our Earth contains extensive evidence of astronomic bombardment in the form of meteorite impact craters. This paper offers an interpretive account of impact craters as archives that operate as mineral resources, data repositories modelling collision risk, sites of colonial dispossession, and apocalypse‐themed tourist spectacles. They also function more prosaically as venues for environmental and cosmological consciousness‐raising posing questions about life, death, judgement, and the final destiny of humankind. The paper examines how impact craters are compiled into an archive and epistemologically secured through spectacularizing grammars of astrophysics and geophysics that occlude situated knowledges and ontologies. A critical analysis of how craters are made visitable on‐the‐ground reveals important patterns of exclusion hidden behind apparently neutral and objective Western scientific frameworks of interpretation. Impact craters, understood as archives, show that just as meteorites are regularly made known through an astro‐colonial gaze, the places marked by their landing, craters, are similarly subject to exclusionary re‐coding. Nonetheless, they provide important opportunities to re‐cast our planetary politics in more plural and inclusive ways.