FE Meme
Craters Should Look Like This, Not That?
#244: Real impact craters should look like one shape (raised rim / clean bowl) and not like the messy depressions geologists show, because these formations were not created by meteors.
The Meme
Side-by-side crater photos with bold labels "LOOK LIKE THIS" versus "AND NOT LIKE THIS?" comparing two different crater morphologies.
Why It Spreads
Most people never visit impact sites, so a confident before/after crater photo pair with LOOK LIKE THIS versus AND NOT LIKE THIS feels like field evidence. Institutional distrust makes the meme's single-template expectation sound like independent geology rather than cherry-picked morphology.
What It Gets Wrong
The side-by-side crater photos labeled "LOOK LIKE THIS" versus "AND NOT LIKE THIS?" cherry-pick two morphologies as if hypervelocity impacts produce one stock template. Crater form scales with energy and gravity: a ~1 km simple bowl differs from a ~100 km complex ring structure, and both erode over geological time, which is why catalogs document a full morphology sequence rather than one meme pair. Shatter cones, shocked quartz, melt breccia, and experimental scaling independently tie many structures to impacts regardless of which JPEG looks messier. TestTheGlobe's No Curvature Is Visible and TestTheGlobe's Curvature Calculator walk through the observations and predictions this image skips.
The Debunk
The side-by-side crater photos labeled "LOOK LIKE THIS" versus "AND NOT LIKE THIS?" cherry-pick two morphologies as if impacts produce one template shape. Crater form scales with energy: a ~1 km simple bowl differs from a ~100 km complex ring structure, and both erode over geological time, which is why catalogs show a full morphology sequence, not one meme pair.
- Impact diameter scales with projectile energy and gravity; simple bowls dominate small fresh craters while large events form peak-ring structures; TestTheGlobe's No Curvature Is Visible is unrelated geology, but TestTheGlobe's Curvature Calculator models measurable Earth geometry instead of photo pairs.
- Two hand-picked photos ignore dated craters with shocked quartz and iridium spikes; TestTheGlobe's Horizon Distance predicts how terrain hides with altitude, a different observation category than impact morphology.
- Lunar and terrestrial catalogs document morphology transitions with size; TestTheGlobe's Horizon Stays At Eye Level addresses horizon arguments, while crater science uses radial profiles and mineral shock fabrics the meme omits.
- Erosion fills and inverts rims over millions of years; TestTheGlobe's No Curvature Is Visible notes that single snapshots cannot overturn catalogs spanning continents and other worlds.