‘Crater of the Largest Known Meteorite to Hit Earth Has Been Discovered in Laos’
3 January 2020
18:36
A team of international scientists have discovered the crater from the largest known meteorite to hit Earth. According to the journal PNAS, traces of the meteorite’s impact with our planet can be observed on approximately one tenth of the Earth’s territory. One may ask why researchers did not notice this huge crater, which is about 13 kilometres wide and 17 kilometres long, before. That is because it is buried beneath lava.
Een bron is geen bron. En de bron is iets genuanceerder qua formaat (zie aangebracht TPOOKTECH cursief).
Significance
A field of black glassy blobs, strewn across about 20% of Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere, resulted from the impact of a large meteorite about 790,000 y ago. The large crater from which these tektites originated has eluded discovery for over a century, although evidence has long pointed to a location somewhere within Indochina, near the northern limit of the strewn field. We present stratigraphic, geochemical, geophysical, and geochronological evidence that the ∼15-km diameter crater lies buried beneath a large, young volcanic field in Southern Laos.
Abstract
The crater and proximal effects of the largest known young meteorite impact on Earth have eluded discovery for nearly a century. We present 4 lines of evidence that the 0.79-Ma impact crater of the Australasian tektites lies buried beneath lavas of a long-lived, 910-km3 volcanic field in Southern Laos: 1) [-]
