An asteroid struck here in the deep Precambrian, with estimates ranging from roughly 1.6 to 1.7 billion years ago, when the only life on Earth was microbial and the land had no plants, no soil, no sound. The original crater was far larger and far deeper than what survives. More than a billion years of erosion have planed the landscape flat, slicing the crater open like a specimen on a bench and exposing its internal anatomy. At the center, a plug of ancient Teague Granite was shoved upward by the impact. Around it, layers of sedimentary rock buckled downward into a ring-shaped trough. What we walk on today is not the crater but its roots.

For decades no one was sure what had made the ring. The first published suggestion that it might be an impact came in 1974, and proof followed when geologists found the unmistakable signatures of a hypervelocity strike. Shatter cones, distinctive rock fractures that radiate like the inside of a horse chestnut, can only form under the instantaneous pressure of an impact. Shocked quartz, with crystal lattices deformed by a shockwave, tells the same story. No volcano, no earthquake, no slow geological process leaves these marks. They are written only by something arriving from space at many kilometres per second, and the Shoemaker structure carries them clearly.

The crater sits on a geological seam, the boundary between the Archaean Yilgarn craton, a slab of crust among the oldest on Earth, and the younger Earaheedy Basin laid down on top of it. Lake Teague and a constellation of smaller salt lakes occupy the low ground of the rings, filling briefly after rare rains and then drying to glittering crust under the sun. The setting is austere and immense, a place where the planet's earliest chapters lie exposed at the surface. Few spots on Earth let you stand inside something this old and this violent, now utterly silent.

The crater was renamed for Eugene "Gene" Shoemaker, the American geologist who all but invented the study of impacts and co-discovered the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994. Shoemaker had dreamed of walking on the Moon as its first geologist, but Addison's disease grounded him. On 18 July 1997 he was killed in a car crash on the Tanami Track, not far across the outback from this very crater. Two years later, a capsule of his ashes rode the Lunar Prospector probe to the Moon and was deliberately crashed into its surface, making Shoemaker the only human ever buried off-world. His name on a billion-year-old Australian scar is a fitting echo. He spent his life on the trail of impacts, and one bears his name in the desert he died crossing.