Moon stone in the Ries Crater Museum, retrieved by astronauts the town helped train. Photo / Getty Images
Moon stone in the Ries Crater Museum, retrieved by astronauts the town helped train. Photo / Getty Images
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. In a perfectly circular crater made by an asteroid, is a town whose buildings are made out of millions of tiny diamonds.
However, far from the planet Krypton, the town of Nördlingen is located in Bavaria, south Germany. . . Earth.
On first appearance the town looks like your classic German town. Nördlingen's slated red roofs is surrounded by a circular wall and at its centre the tower of the St Georgs Kirche.
However, beneath these roofs scientists have discovered the buildings contain millions of tiny diamonds.
Nordlingen would appear to be your classic German city but has an astronomic secret. Photo / Getty Images
For years people believed the Reis depression was formed by a volcano, explained the Smithsonian magazine. For hundreds of years they thought the hard rocks they were quarrying to build their town were volcanic formations. But the beautiful, speckled suevite stone had not come from the earth, but possibly from outer space.
It was a meteoric discovery that not only changed the history of the town but put it on the radar of NASA.
When the asteroid stuck the area approximately where the church stands now, it landed with such force that graphite was to turn to diamond.
One study calculated this to be around 60 Gigapascal, or 6000 times the pressure of the Hiroshima bomb.
Meteoric: A detail from the work of Bavarian artist Albrecht Durer. Image / supplied, Met Gallery
Fortunately there were no Nördlingers around at the time to witness it. The impact happened around 15 million years ago.
"We assume that the asteroid was a stony one with a weight of three billion tons," said Gisela Pösges, director of the Reis Crater Museum in the town. "The asteroid was a similar size to the town of Nördlingen, about one kilometre across," she told the Smithsonian.
It left a crater that is fifteen kilometres across. Today the earth around it is filled with unusual gemstones and rock formations. Something that has been built into the very walls of the town.
"Our church, St. Georgs, is made of suevite [and contains] about 5,000 carats of diamonds," she says.
For a story which is already extraordinary, in the 1960s the town's story took another astronomic turn. It was discovered that the rock structures from around the Nördlingen crater resembled that of the moon.
NASA training ground: Rugged rocks on the edge of the imact crater circle the church tower of Nordlingen. Photo / Supplied
NASA sent its astronauts to the town to train for the Apollo 14 mission in which they were to bring back stone from the moon.
In gratitude the town's museum has a piece of moon stone gifted by NASA and on permanent display.
However, in a town full of diamonds this moon rock might be the most impressive stone on display. Those hoping to get rich from precious stones might be disappointed. These diamonds are mostly microscopic.
"But they're so tiny—the [largest] ones are 0.3 mm—that they have no economic value, only scientific value. You can observe the diamonds only with a microscope."
However the town of Nördlingen is a rare find in its own right and the museum helps visitors understand its unique history.
