Lonar, sits quietly in Maharashtra’s Buldhana district — another unremarkable stretch of the Deccan plateau and nothing about its approach prepares you for what lies behind the low hills at its edge.
Roughly 52,000 years ago, a meteor weighing over a million tonnes struck the Earth’s basalt crust at around 90,000 kilometres per hour. The crater it left behind is nearly two kilometres wide and 150 metres deep and at its centre sits a hyper-saline, highly alkaline lake of a jade-green so vivid it looks chemically enhanced. It is one of only four confirmed impact craters in the world formed in basaltic rock and the only one with a surviving lake.
Standing at the rim at dawn, the ground drops away sharply. Below, a dense canopy of teak, tamarind and neem insulates the basin from the surrounding plateau and the humidity rises noticeably as you descend the steep, crumbling stone path to the shoreline — a drop of roughly 130 metres accompanied by langur monkeys overhead and the distant, unsettling call of peacocks. The water at the bottom has a pH sitting around 10.5 and a low sulphurous note hangs in the air. The dark mud underfoot contains maskelynite glass, a mineral formed only under the shockwaves of a meteor impact, found elsewhere only on the moon.
What separates Lonar from every other impact site on Earth is what was built here afterwards. The Chalukya dynasty raised a series of temples along the crater rim and within the jungle fringe during the 12th century, in the Hemadpanti architectural style. The Daitya Sudan Temple in the town itself — carved entirely from black stone, its surface dense with deities and mythological figures — is worth a visit before you begin the descent. The entry free to the lake is `40.
