Impact glass
Lechatelierite (almost pure silica glass) and water content below 300 ppm — too dry to be volcanic.
The impact
An asteroid, 815,000 years ago.
Until 2019 the circular valley was often assumed to be a volcanic collapse. Fieldwork and laboratory evidence now show it is Central America's first confirmed meteorite crater.
What happened
A chondritic asteroid from the main belt struck the volcanic highlands of northern Nicaragua. Shock pressures exceeded 30 GPa. Temperatures rose above 2,000 °C. Target rock melted into glass, some of it flung as far as Belize — 530 km to the north.
The crater that remains is about 14 km across, centred near 13.36°N, 85.95°W in the municipality of Santa María de Pantasma, Department of Jinotega. It is young for a structure this large: two ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar plateau ages on impact glass give a combined age of 815 ± 11 thousand years.
Erosion in this wet highland has softened the rim, but the circle is still obvious from the air and on topographic maps. The valley floor is a working agricultural basin. The mountains around it — 600 to 1,100 metres — are the ruined walls of the impact.
Select a feature
Read the basin
The rim
A 14 km circle of mountains, 600–1,100 m. Outward-dipping volcanic flows. The walkable edge of the event.
Diagnostic evidence
Coesite & reidite
High-pressure polymorphs of quartz and zircon. They form only under shock, not ordinary volcanism.
Extraterrestrial chromium
Polymict breccia from the crater centre carries an ε⁵⁴Cr signature of an ordinary chondrite.
Outward-dipping flows
Oligocene volcanic layers around the rim dip away from the basin — the geometry of an impact, not a caldera.
Deep ejecta
A possible ejecta blanket includes Paleozoic rocks lifted from hundreds of metres below the surface.
A young landscape
Geomorphology and erosion models match an 800-thousand-year crater, not a Tertiary volcano.
Among Earth's young giants
Pantasma is one of only four known impact craters on Earth that are both larger than 10 km and younger than 3 million years.
Bosumtwi
Ghana
10.5 km · ~1 Ma · also a tektite source
Zhamanshin
Kazakhstan
~14 km · ~0.9 Ma
Hiawatha
Greenland
31 km · under ice, published 2018
Pantasma
Nicaragua
14 km · 815 ka · first in Central America
The Belize connection
Petroleum geologist Jean Cornec documented a field of distal impact glasses — tektites — in western Belize. Argon ages, chemistry, and isotopes match Pantasma. The pair is the American analogue of Bosumtwi and the Ivory Coast tektites: one crater, a glass strewn field hundreds of kilometres away.
How it was found
2006
Leo Kowald notices the circular valley on Google Earth while preparing a trip with Pan y Arte.
2009
Rolando E. Téllez begins field work and collecting impact glass, tektites, and breccia.
2016
First scientific presentation at the Meteoritical Society meeting in Berlin. Field campaign collects the samples that prove the impact.
2019
Rochette et al. publish in Meteoritics & Planetary Science. Pantasma enters the confirmed impact-crater record.
2021
Follow-up work ties the Belize tektite field to the crater.