The Wabar craters are impact craters located in Saudi Arabia first brought to the attention of Western scholars by British Arabist, explorer, writer and Colonial Office intelligence officer St John Philby, who discovered them while searching for the legendary city of Ubar in Arabia's Rub' al Khali ("Empty Quarter") in 1932.

[1] The vast desert wasteland of southern Saudi Arabia known as the Empty Quarter, or Rub' al Khali in Arabic, is one of the most desolate places on Earth.

In 1932, Harry St John "Jack" Philby was hunting for a city named Ubar, that the Quran describes being destroyed by God for defying the Prophet Hud.

Philby thought that the area was a volcano, and it was only after bringing back samples to the UK that the site was identified as that of a meteorite impact by Leonard James Spencer of the British Museum.

These craters were respectively about 100 and 50 yards in diameter, sunken in the middle but half choked with sand, while inside and outside their walls lay what I took to be lava in great circles where it seemed to have flowed out from the fiery furnace.

Further examination revealed the fact that there were three similar craters close by, though these were surmounted by hills of sand and recognizable only by reason of the fringe of blackened slag round their edges.

Analysis showed it to be about 90% iron and 5% nickel, with the rest consisting of various elements, including copper, cobalt, and an unusually high concentration of iridium, at 6 ppm.

On his last visit, in 1982, he noted that the desert winds and resultant movement of the dune system were covering the site: "instead of two thirds of the crater rim (visible as before [in 1966, 16 years earlier]), less than a quarter of it showed.

The surface of the area partly consisted of "Insta-Rock" or "impactite", a bleached-white, coarsely-laminar sandstone-look-alike, and was littered with black glass slag and pellets.

The layout of the impact area suggests that the body fell at a shallow angle, and was moving at typical (although slightly slow) meteorite entry speeds of 11–17 km/s.