Makhtesh Ramon

The story

Makhtesh Ramon is the largest erosion crater in the world: forty kilometers is its length, nine kilometers its width at the widest place, and about 350 meters its depth. It is not an impact crater and it is not the mouth of a volcano. Its shape was formed in six stages: layers of soft sandstone settled at depth, above them a layer of hard limestone settled in the Cenomanian period, tectonic pressure arched the layers into a dome, weathering wore away the top of the dome and exposed the soft rocks beneath it, and the stream that flowed at the place cut down and carried the material out. The northern cliff of the crater carries Mitzpe Ramon, which arose in 1951 as a camp of the workers of the road to Eilat and became a permanent locality on 26 May 1956. Inside the crater stands the Minsara, a mass of thousands of column fragments of ten to twenty centimeters that were formed from quartz. In September 2017 the international organization for dark sky reserves recognized the place as a starlight reserve — the first in the Middle East.

• Desert