Earth's Haunting Craters: BIG PICS

Meteor Crater, Arizona -- Photographer Stan Gaz was in Arizona when he came across a postcard of the Meteor Crater.

"The postcard intrigued me, so I went to see it," he said. "My father was a geologist. He would take me on these expeditional trips to go rock hunting when he was alive, when I was a kid. When I saw the crater it made me think of him, what he would have thought, what his reaction would have been. Immediately I thought, 'I'm going to look into this more.'"

In 2003, Gaz launched into a six-year-long global project of tracking down and photographing the planet's cosmic scars, beginning with Meteor Crater. The results speak for themselves: haunting, otherworldly images of craters that are familiar, and yet utterly strange.

Meteor Crater, shown above, became the world's first confirmed extraterrestrial impact crater when the famous planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker found the rare minerals stishovite and coesite, which only form during cosmic collisions or nuclear blasts, at the crater site in 1960. It was formed when an iron-rich asteroid about 160 feet in diameter smacked into the Arizona desert 40,000 years ago.

WATCH VIDEO: Iron meteorites are particularly sensitive to even the slightest bit of moisture -- including the touch of a finger.

Gosses Bluff, Northern Territory, Australia -- Gaz's riveting, stark images make you wonder if you're actually looking at Earth. In the image above, he turned the sky into a black, alien thing by using a red filter (in front of black and white film) when he shot the 14 mile-wide Gosses Bluff, which formed 142.5 million years ago.

"Aboriginals believe that Gosses Bluff was created by a baby falling to Earth from the sky," Gaz said. "The goddesses were dancing and knocked the baby out of their arms. The more mythology that surrounds these places, the more fascinating they are."

WATCH VIDEO: Thousands of asteroids, comets and other near-Earth object buzzing by our planet constantly.

Upheaval Dome, Utah -- It's not surprising that the origins of some craters are the subject of decades-long controversy. The terrific heat and energy of an impact often vaporize large asteroids made of nearly solid iron and nickel.

Such is the case at Upheaval Dome, shown above. Scientists have gone back and forth over whether the pummeled, uplifted rocks were abused by a salt dome that rose from below, or cosmic artillery from above. In 2008, researchers discovered the presence of shocked quartz (stishovite, or its close cousin coesite) in the dome, confirming its extraterrestrial origins.

"The initial feeling is of being in a place where something huge happened. It makes me wonder: what was it like when it happened? Is there anything left of the meteorite?" Gaz said. "There are a bunch of unknowns; I love stuff like that where all of the questions haven't been answered yet."

WATCH VIDEO: Can you tell the difference between an asteroid and a meteorite?

New Quebec (aka Pingualuit) Crater, Quebec, Canada -- As a child, Gaz used to follow his father around, rock hounding in the hills of Southern California, in search of illusive pink crystals of rose quartz.

"Once in a while you found something, and it was like finding a treasure," Gaz said.

On his many trips to far-flung locales for his book, Sites of Impact, Gaz described having the same feeling upon arriving at a crater for the first time.

Located in the treeless tundra of the Canadian Arctic, Pingualuit, shown above, certainly fits the "treasure" bill. Its almost perfectly round, 2.1 mile-wide rim encloses an isolated, crystal clear lake that plummets almost 900 feet to the crater floor. Local Inuits know the 1.4 million year-old dimple as the "Crystal Eye of Nunavik;" pretty impressive for a region strewn with pristine lakes and waterways.

WATCH VIDEO: Is that rock from Earth or outer space? Scientists in Washington D.C. will tell you for free!

Henbury, Northern Territory, Australia -- "A lot of my work is about mortality," Gaz said. "By doing it in black and white, you get a sense of beginning and end together, positive and negative."

Nothing could be more appropriate for Henbury, shown above. In a turn of tragic cosmic irony, the great crater hunter and legendary scientist Shoemaker -- the one who put Meteor Crater on the map -- died in a head-on collision with another car while driving outside Alice Springs, Australia in 1997, not far from Henbury.

Sprayed like a shotgun blast across the plains, it's a mute testament to the many strange forms cosmic collisions can take. Just 5,000 years old, these 13 craters range in size from 33 feet to 525 feet in diameter -- tiny compared to others, but more than enough to leave a lasting impression.

In this image, Gaz again brings forth the dark sky that evokes outer space, and we are reminded that such collisions are all too common in our solar system.

"You know, it makes you feel like we live on a planet; it's not just this landscape. A lot of things have happened here, and will happen here again," he said.

WATCH VIDEO: A controversial new theory says an asteroid impact may have caused a massive tsunami in New York City more than 2,000 years ago.

Article by Michael Reilly. Images courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press