Where have Earth’s craters gone?

Certainly we have the striking Meteor Crater in Arizona, and Chicxulub, which lies beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the 100-mile-wide scar of the meteor that likely killed off the dinosaurs.

Some of the cosmic battering, from the space rocks that landed in the oceans, did not carve out craters. Others have been erased by erosion and plate tectonics.

Still, there do not seem to be enough craters on our planet, especially from the older eras — just 190 confirmed examples worldwide.

A new study suggests that geologists cannot find more big de nts i n Earth’s surface because they were never there.