Photos

Forty kilometers north of Pretoria lies a ring of hills a kilometer in diameter and 100 meters high. These hills are the walls of an impact crater left by an asteroid which hit there some 200 000 years ago. The Tswaing crater is similar in size to the well-known Barringer meteor crater in Arizona. The crater walls at Tswaing were originally about twice as high as they are today. The photograph shows you what it looks like today.

The crater is called Tswaing in seTswana, the local language of the area, or Soutpan in Afrikaans. Both names mean Salt Pan and this derives from the lake of salty water that fills the centre.

There is a museum adjacent to the crater. A path leads from the museum to the crater, along the rim, and down to the central lake. The crater is covered with indigenous trees and bushes, and attracts a variety of bird life.

From Wikipedia:
Tswaing is a meteorite crater in South Africa. This astrobleme is 1.13 km in diameter and 100 m deep [1] and the age is estimated to be 220,000 ± 52,000 years (Pleistocene). The impactor is believed to have been a chondrite or stony meteorite some 30 to 50 m in diameter that was vaporized during the impact event.

The name Tswaing means Place of Salt in Tswana and the crater was also formerly known in English: as Pretoria Saltpan crater and in Afrikaans: as Soutpankrater. Stone tools from the Middle Stone Age show that the crater was regularly visited by people from as far back as 100 000 years ago in order to hunt and collect salt. Water in the crater comes from surface springs, ground water and rain water and is rich in dissolved carbonates and sodium chlorides. Tswana and Sotho people harvested the salt by filtering and decoction between 1200 AD and 1800 AD. Between 1912 and 1956 brine was pumped from the floor of the crater by the company SA Alkali Ltd. in order to extract soda and salt.

Tswaing is currently on the tentative list for consideration as a World Heritage Site.