Kentland crater
The Kentland structure, also called the Kentland crater or Kentland disturbed area, is an impact site near Kentland in Newton County, Indiana. It was found around 1880 when two farmers began quarrying rock there. Rocks at the site show features typical of an impact, such as shatter cones and deformed beds, leading geologists by the late 1960s to conclude that it is a deeply eroded impact crater, not a volcanic feature. The rocks are bent and stacked in ways that create unusual vertical contacts between layers of different ages.
The site is a circular dome about 7.2 kilometers (4.5 miles) across, deeply eroded and buried in glacial debris. The entire disturbed area spans roughly 13 kilometers (8 miles) in diameter. At the center lies Shakopee dolomite, about 450 million years old, which has been uplifted about 2,000 feet higher than the same rock nearby. The structure’s age is estimated as younger than 97 million years, but the exact timing is debated.
Kentland has been studied since 1978, including fission-track dating of apatite. Evidence such as coesite and shatter cones near the center supports its impact origin. Today, the exposed structure is being worked as a quarry, and much of the crater’s surface features have been erased by erosion.
Geographically, the disturbance is located about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) east of Kentland, Indiana. The ring around the site, separating the uplifted core from the surrounding flat bedrock, has a radius of about 6.2 kilometers (3.9 miles). The center’s uplift displaced materials at lower levels to fill the void created as the central rock rose. Beneath the surface, the bedrock includes Ordovician carbonates in the core and Silurian rocks around it, with older Mississippian to Devonian rocks present nearby. The already eroded structure has lost more than 300 meters (about 980 feet) of rock since the original impact, and a layer of glacial till covers parts of the area from the Wisconsin Glaciation.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:01 (CET).