A few weeks ago, we brought you news of a newly discovered crater in Greenland. Hidden beneath a glacier, this ancient pockmark on our planet was formed when a meteorite struck the earth about 58 million years ago. This crater is large – about 30 kilometers in diameter – but its formation wasn’t an extinction event. 

When we covered that story, it got me thinking about just how often our world has had metropolis-sized regions turned into bowls. Our planet’s surface is mostly water. What land we do have is constantly getting reshaped through weather and plate tectonics, and just finding old landscapes to go fossil hunting in can be a challenge. Even so, forty odd craters between 10 and 100 kilometers wide have been discovered. Forty may not seem like a lot, but there are fewer megacities on Earth than megacity-sized craters.

And when you start to realize that for every London, Lagos, or Beijing, there is a London, Lagos, or Beijing-sized crater… That is a new perspective.

And with this new perspective, I decided to journey down the rabbit hole and learn more about the meteorites that have literally left their mark on our world through the ages. On that journey, I discovered the newly published book, Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong.

Written by Greg Brennecka, this book takes readers on a journey from that first great impact that helped shape the Moon and carries them forward to the latest in meteor science. With a 2022 copyright, I really do mean the latest.

Going into reading this book, I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t heard of the author, who is a cosmochemist at Lawernce Livermore National Laboratory, and while I have to admit I’m not sure how you can make asteroid impacts boring, science conferences have taught me that anything – even supervolcanoes – can be polished to dull exposition given sufficient academic treatment.

Folks, this book is not dull. What’s more, I’m pretty sure Brennecka could have talked about the most boring topics in science and still kept my attention with wordplay, sarcasm, and science.

Like many of you, I grew up on science books written by Boomers. The best books sought to be poetic or elegant in language. The personification of worlds we often use when discussing things together and the sarcasm that gets into a more frustrating analysis of data, it all got erased in words that were put out for the public. I grew up on Carl Sagan’s “we are all made of stardust” while thinking, “Dude, you’re just the recycled shrapnel of a star that exploded and somehow came to life.”

I am Gen X, and while I’m not sure if Brennecka would call himself a baby Gen X’er or an elder Millenial, I am here to tell you that his use of pop culture references and dark humor spoke to me. At times, I found myself reading pages about things I already know really well, just because I wanted to see what twist of language or novel analogy he would use. This book had me waking the house as I laughed out loud trying to read in bed.

Do not read this book in bed if you are surrounded by light sleepers.

The language was a delight, and then along the way, I got to fully explore the rabbit warren that is the cratered history of Earth and all the ways space rocks have influenced culture, religion, and even video games. I learned new details about how iron beads from meteorites made their way into pre-iron age rituals, and I’m not going to tell you how Donkey Kong is related to meteorites. You’re just going to have to read this book for yourself.

Published by Harper Collins, this 250-page adventure in space rocks is available online just about everywhere. It is entirely black and white, but the words are punctuated with photos and delightful cartoon diagrams.

This book is joy. Somewhat sarcastic, sometimes darkly humorous, joy. I loved it. Get it. You will love it, too, and have some new weird stories for the next time you see a meteor streak the sky while chatting at night with friends.