Nördlingen Ries

Yes, the medieval town of Nördlingen in Bavaria, Germany, is built entirely within the Nördlinger Ries impact crater. The town's 14th-century church, St. Georgskirche, was constructed using suevite—a distinctive impact-breccia rock formed by the meteorite collision—meaning many of the town's buildings are literally made from the crater's own stone.

In the early 1960s, American geologist Eugene Shoemaker and colleague Edward Chao discovered coesite and stishovite—high-pressure forms of quartz that can only form during meteorite impacts—in rocks from the Ries. This discovery definitively proved the crater's impact origin and helped establish impact cratering as a legitimate geological process on Earth.

The crater was formed approximately 14 to 15 million years ago during the Miocene epoch when an asteroid roughly 1.5 kilometers in diameter struck what is now Bavaria. The impact created a crater about 24 kilometers across and devastated the surrounding landscape across central Europe.

Yes, suevite is visible in numerous buildings throughout Nördlingen, including the prominent St. Georgskirche tower that dominates the town's skyline. The local museum also displays shocked quartz and suevite specimens, and visitors can walk along the crater rim trail to observe geological features formed by the impact.