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Arizona's incredible crater is an out-of-the-sky meteorite. Arizona Crater, also known as Baringer Crater, is a huge crater in the Arizona Desert with a diameter of kilometers and a depth of 180 meters, which was formed by a meteorite hitting the Earth about 50,000 years ago. The main component of that meteorite is iron, which can be tens of meters wide.
The crater is named after mining engineer Daniel Baringer, who first identified it as a meteorite impact in the early 20th century, more than 50 years before the consensus is accepted. <>
The mass of the meteorite is estimated at several million tons, and the impact speed into the Earth's atmosphere is between 10 and 20 kilometers per second. About 10 million tons of TNT equivalent are released on impact, which is equivalent to a large nuclear bomb. Rarely, the Arizona crater is located in the desert, which means that the traces of the impact have been preserved for that long.
If the impact occurred in another part of the world, such as a forest or ocean, it would not leave a recognizable trace after tens of thousands of years (or even hundreds of thousands). On average, the Earth's land surface experiences a shock of this magnitude about once every 1,000 years, and for every impact on land, there are two impacts in the oceans. The giant crater in Arizona, located near Flagstaff in Arizona, has long been a mystery to scientists.
Two planetary scientists, Jay Millausch of the University of Arizona and Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, published a research article in the journal Nature, in which they concluded that the meteorite that hit Arizona 49,000 years ago was just a fragment of a large meteorite. <>
According to scientific calculations, the meteorite hit the ground at a speed of 72,000 kilometers per hour, forming a crater with a diameter of kilometers and a depth of up to 150 meters. But if it hits the ground at such a fast speed, it should release a lot of heat energy, and the meteorites themselves are rich in iron minerals, and the high temperature generated by the collision will cause them to melt instantly, but there has never been a trace of molten iron ore in the area. The new study explains that no traces of molten iron ore have been found because the meteorite is nothing more than the largest fragment shed by a giant meteorite with a diameter of 42 meters.
Entering the Earth's atmosphere, the giant meteorite ruptured at an altitude of about 14 kilometers, and the air pressure itself acted as a buffer for the meteorite and caused the meteorite to break. The pieces fall in the shape of a pancake, and the resistance of the atmosphere acts as a brake on it.
The meteorite that finally hit the Earth was about 20 meters in diameter, and the energy released by the impact was equivalent to the energy of megatons of TNT explosives, or at least 150 Hiroshima atomic bombs, and the energy released entered the atmosphere and could cause huge waves. Meteorites hitting the Earth at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour can cause great disasters. The most recent known giant meteorite hit Earth occurred in 1908, when a meteorite with an estimated diameter of 50 meters struck the ground 8 kilometers near Tunguska, Russia, producing energy that destroyed 2,000 square kilometers of forest.
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is also thought to have been caused by the impact of a giant meteorite in what is now Mexico.
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This rare form of silica can only be found in places where quartz-containing rocks are severely impacted by instantaneous overpressure.
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About 50,000 years ago, a rock fragment broke off from the asteroid belt and washed towards Earth. The rock, which is made up of nickel and iron, spans about 50m and weighs 300,000 tonnes. It is measured in kilometers per second.
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The key discovery was the presence of coss and quartz in the minerals, a rare form of silica that can only be found in places where quartz-containing rocks are severely impacted by transient overpressure.
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Meteor craters remain one of the most impressive.
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A crater of this size should be a meteorite, and a volcano can't make it that big.
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It is believed that all natural landforms are slowly created over thousands or even millions of years.
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It's all craters, what else can it be, such a big crater, it must be a meteorite.
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It's a crater that fell from outside the sky.
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This estimate is more than extraterrestrial meteorites, and volcanoes are generally impossible.
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French scientists recently discovered what is said to be the largest crater area in Egypt. This area covers an area of 5,000 square kilometres.
A scientific team of French and Egyptian scientists has discovered the world's largest crater area in Egypt with the help of satellite photographs**. The crater area is located in the border area between Egypt and Libya, where scientists have found traces left by the fall of more than 100 meteorites.
Philippe Paeu, the head of the French expedition, said that to be able to spread over an area of 5,000 square kilometers, several meteorites must fly to the area, and they have already been broken into multiple pieces by the friction of the air when they enter the Earth's atmosphere. According to preliminary judgment, these craters appeared 50 million years ago.
Experts are currently analyzing the meteorite fragments in the crater to prove that a "meteor shower" occurred in the area about 50 million years ago.
According to the information provided by the researchers, the traces they found were left by a meteorite shower 50 million years ago.