Giant Impact Crater Found In Australia 109
An anonymous reader writes "One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the South Australian outback by geothermal researchers. It may explain one of the many extinction events in the past 600 million years, and may contain rare and exotic minerals. The crater is said to have been 'produced by an asteroid six to 12 km across' — which is really big!"
Re:discovered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously not in the article.. not even one damn picture of it..
Re:discovered? (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously not in the article.. not even one damn picture of it..
It is very difficult to photograph something that is 80-160 km across and buried under many layers of sediments... that may have something to do with the lack of pictures.
TFA doesn't mention when the discovery was made, so it is hard to say how much time they've had to produce some images for the media.
I can imagine that specialized satellites can scan the area for geological differences. But I imagine that Google Maps shows no sign of this crater at all.
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I just see a face
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A squareish circle. Is it also a largeish small one, maybe also blackish white? :)
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Maybe he means a Squircle [wikipedia.org]?
I can't believe you just said that.
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Okay so they say in TFA that the crater has most likely eroded away, but they could have at least shown a map of the region with a yellow circle to indicate where they think it is.
Re:discovered? (Score:5, Informative)
> they could have at least shown a map of the region with a yellow circle to indicate where they think it is.
They said the geothermal researcher who discovered this crater was working in the Cooper Basin, South Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Basin
This is where it is:
http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/CooperbasinAust/images/2-cooper-basin.jpg
The geothermal energy project in that area of the world is near the town of Innaminka.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innamincka,_South_Australia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Innamincka_location_map_in_South_Australia.PNG
The geothermal energy project is there because the earth's crust at that location is unusually thin.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/hot-rock-power-the-way-ahead/2007/04/11/1175971183212.html
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/adelaidean/issues/9461/news9469.html
The earth's thin crust in that area may actually have something to do with the impact crater.
This is a quite remote part of the world. Desert. There is almost nothing there.
It is not really surprising that this impact crater has not been discovered up until now.
Re:discovered? (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Innamincka_location_map_in_South_Australia.PNG [wikipedia.org]
Does Innamincka mean "Belong to Mick"?
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The earth's thin crust in that area may actually have something to do with the impact crater.
Or possibly the impact has caused the crust to be thin in this area. Such a large impact certainly would have had an effect on the entire thickness of the crust in that area.
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But how much energy is that? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:But how much energy is that? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would guess the ground. When a meteor hits land, a lot of the ejected material is from the ground, not the meteor itself. Rocks apparently have a lot of oxygen and carbon locked up in them.
Especially limestone (Score:4, Informative)
Limestone is calcium carbonate, which releases tons of CO2 when burned.
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Limestone is calcium carbonate, which releases tons of CO2 when burned.
Unless you only burn a few kilograms. Then it releases kilograms of CO2.
*gulps more coffee*
Nine times out of ten (Score:1)
Not going to ask, I have to call my ex while I am still laughing.
And feeling vaguely vindicated.
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Maybe it crashed into a limestone formation? Limestone (and other carbonate rock like marble and karst) are basically giant lumps of CO2.
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The earths crust contains carbon, and this impact would have vaporized a lot of that. Also there would be molten bits of rock flung over the whole planet, causing a global firestorm from whatever vegetation was around at the time.
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Okay so they give widely varying estimates of the crater's size - assuming the centre value of 120 Km a +/- 60 Km ia one hell of a margin of error. I imagine that the energy released from such an impact is orders of magnitude greater than any nuke we could ever throw at each other. The article metions the release of CO2, but i thought that by definition asteroids were just lumps of rock. So where does the CO2 come from after the impact?
It is about 100,000 megatons, at its peak the world nuclear arsenal had around 20,000 megatons.
CO2 is released if the asteroid impacts a carbonate rock bed - it then releases the CO2 just like a giant cement kiln (which is a major source of human CO2 release BTW - about 5% of the global release).
Where? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA doesn't mention a location. There is a roughly circular sort of feature in about the right place and about the right size centred here:
http://maps.google.com.au/?ie=UTF8&ll=-28.614665,141.139984&spn=0.806518,1.234589&t=h&z=10 [google.com.au]
You can see it better if you zoom out a couple of steps. It's not very well defined, and may just be wishful thinking on my part!
Re:Where? (Score:4, Funny)
You're looking for a roughly circular feature? I think this is a more likely spot personally:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?sll=-28.87835,141.047974&sspn=4.39095,8.453979&ll=-35.310258,149.125156&spn=0.015987,0.033023&t=h&z=16 [google.com.au]
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You beat me to it also, but as an old St. Kilda person, I was going for the MCG:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Melbourne+Cricket+Ground,+Victoria,+Australia&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.388698,77.695313&ie=UTFhttp://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/27/0310246/Giant-Impact-Crater-Found-In-Australia?from=rss#8&hq=&hnear=Melbourne+Cricket+Ground,+Brunton+Ave,+East+Melbourne+Victoria+3002,+Australia&ll=-37.820006,144.983332&spn=0.005433,0.0 [google.com]
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Here's a circular feature in southern central interior Australia, and all the street names around it come from minerals:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?sll=-28.87835,141.047974&sspn=4.39095,8.453979&ll=-35.310258,149.125156&spn=0.015987,0.033023&t=h&z=16 [google.com.au]
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Gaaah.
Screwed up the link.
It's here: http://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=-31.955949,141.462311&num=1&t=h&sll=-35.310258,149.125156&sspn=0.015987,0.033023&ie=UTF8&ll=-31.955931,141.462573&spn=0.003973,0.006727&z=18 [google.com.au]
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Every time someone links to this cooper basin, it never seems to work...I still have yet to see it in the map. But anyways, yes, it is Cooper Basin that the article speaks of.
Google Maps (Score:1)
Meh, I've seen bigger... (Score:2)
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It doesn't have to be the biggest crater. Just big enough. An impact of that magnitude would have major catastrophic effects on the whole planet.
And, for what it's worth, I think pretty much the entire northern hemisphere of Mars wins any "I've seen bigger" contest. Link [nature.com] (and a PDF link [diggernet.net] for those without Nature access)
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I've always wondered what damage we'd see if an asteroid that size is dropped from a height of 1km. Would there be devastation (apart from those directly in the firing line)?
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As a quick guess I'd say the destruction would be limited to a relatively small area of the planet. You'd have total devastation within a radius of maybe a few hundred kilometers, but the rest of the planet would be fine. You wouldn't have ash encircling the planet and blocking out the sun as with a Chicxulub-type impact (which is by far the most devastating effect of a large asteroid impact to life on a planet), although you may still get some smaller Eyjafjallajokull-size ash clouds.
Now if it landed in th
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You wouldn't have ash encircling the planet and blocking out the sun as with a Chicxulub-type impact (which is by far the most devastating effect of a large asteroid impact to life on a planet), although you may still get some smaller Eyjafjallajokull-size ash clouds. Now if it landed in the ocean you'd have serious mega-tsunamis that would wipe out of a lot of coastal areas all around the world, but again not devastating on a planetary scale.
Well, don't take it as fact, but the geologist who discovered t
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Oh, sure, sure, but you really had to hike there before all the tourists discovered it and ruined the local culture.
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Nobody is saying this is the biggest crater ever created in the solar system.
But, they are saying that anything which creates a crater of that size on Earth is going to make one hell of a mess. From TFA:
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The joke comes from the first time I went on a field trip to Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona. Because I've done some work on the eroded impact craters of Titan, all I said was "Meh, I've seen bigger" because all the crater on Titan are bigger than the mile-wide Barringer crater.
A lot to discover.. (Score:1)
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Some people reckon the entire Pacific Ocean basic and the moon were a result of asteroid impact.. the moon is actually a bunch of material ejected from the earth when the asteroid(s) hit.
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Some people reckon the entire Pacific Ocean basic and the moon were a result of asteroid impact
Many, many years ago, that idea was proposed on some extremely tenuous grounds. There's a faint bell tinkling in my head that it was actually one of Darwin's sons, and the timing is vaguely right for it to have been a response to discovering the high average depth of the Pacific from the Challenger expedition. The idea has never had any strong support from data, and since the turn of the last century (i.e. 1900) it has been a pretty dead idea.
the moon is actually a bunch of material ejected from the earth when the asteroid(s) hit.
That is a gross oversimplification and distortion of the modern
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Probably a lot. Canada has 12 confirmed 20km+ impacts craters including the second largest in the world(250km). And even with the amount of land you're talking about here, there's probably another 4 to 8 dozen that haven't been discovered that are easy to identify. And probably another 10-30 dozen on top of that, which are only faint after the last glaciation period.
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
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Obviously... (Score:3)
This must be where The Lost City of Pnakotus [wikipedia.org] was located!
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I figured it was the end of the Materia era, and someone just cast Meteo way too well.
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I agree with the parent comment.
Slashdot editors, please remove the pandering last sentences we see too often in these summaries. You don't need to ask obvious, leading questions. You don't need to make obvious, emotional statements. Just state the facts in the summary.
boom? (Score:1)
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Even in South Australia I am sure somebody would have noticed a large chunk of the worlds fission bombs going off. That said, Disaster Area [u2.com] are touring again so something is bound to go off.
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Nah, fusion bombs would be far more noticeable.
Original Source (Score:3, Informative)
There's an article [uq.edu.au] on the University of Queensland's web site (where the researchers hail from).
The land surface that the asteroid hit is now buried under layers of sedimentary rock and Dr Uysal thinks the original crater most likely eroded away.
"Dr Uysal and Dr Glikson will present their findings at the Australian Geothermal Energy Conference in Adelaide, 16-19 November 2010."
To read more about their research, see their conference paper (pdf). [uq.edu.au] (This may not be specifically on the impact, but on their geothermal research, instead.)
In short, not the biggest, oldest, newest, or any other superlative. Still, given the estimated size of the impact, I'd expect it to have had a major impact on the Earth's weather for quite a while.
Minerals so exotic... (Score:1)
What would an impact look like? (Score:2)
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me. Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
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Re:What would an impact look like? (Score:5, Interesting)
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me. Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
A very useful source of information is the Asteroid Impact Effects on-line program: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/ [ic.ac.uk]
Taking their upper size estimate (12 km) and average impact parameters (17 km/sec, 45 degree angle of entry) this would light up brilliantly at around 120 km altitude and get brighter all the way down its 10 second transit to the Earth. However you would probably not want to be anywhere you could actually see its entry. At a distance of 1250 km you would just see it light up on entry on the horizon, and thereafter the glow would be indirect until impact. THEN - part of the fireball which appear ~5 times larger and brighter than the Sun would rise above the horizon and irradiate you for about half an hour. This would be quite uncomfortable - a first degree thermal burn would develop after several seconds, but you get roasted for a hundred times longer than that, or until the fine ejecta thrown into space comes down and starts blocking your light after 10 minutes of so. And an hour after the impact a 12 psi blast wave with tornado-speed 335 mph winds would hit. This would likely be fatal.
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On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me.
This is only of academic interest.
Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
If you're observing the touchdown of a multiple-kilometre body (asteroid, banana, comet, dog ; it doesn't matter) on the Earth, from the Earth's surface, and you see the fireball, then you're dead to a close approximation in position and within a couple of hours precision in time. Geologically, these are unimportantly small differences, though they might make some personal difference to you, for a short time.
If you're observing from near-Earth orbit when you see the fireba
May not be from a meteor? (Score:1)
Chicxulub is FURIOUS! (Score:2)
Chicxulub states "I am the ORIGINAL extinction crater, and DON'T YOU FORGET IT!" [wikipedia.org]
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The impact crater in Sudbury [wikipedia.org] is not amused at your piddly size.
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What about the great lakes (Score:2)
Beer atom? (Score:1)
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more shrimp please mate (Score:1)
Not uncommon (Score:3, Interesting)
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http://www.vermont-map.org/vermont.jpg [vermont-map.org]
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"sitting inside one"--nice. Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:
As a Delta Air Lines jet was flying over Arizona on a clear day, the copilot was providing his passengers with a running commentary about landmarks over the PA system.
"Coming up on the right, you can see the Meteor Crater, which is a major tourist attraction in northern Arizona. It was formed when a lump of nickel and iron, roughly 150 feet in diameter and weighing 300,000 tons struck the earth at about 40,000 miles an hour, scattering white
Does anyone know... (Score:2)
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...if The Creation Museum [wikipedia.org] has an exhibit on this yet?
Are they interested in things that weren't mentioned in Ussher? "If it's not in Ussher, it's too recent for us" being their philosophy. So they're welcome to everything else that does get mentioned in Ussher's work, without of course the benefits of modern science to alleviate them.
biblical proportions (Score:2)
> The impact would have been impressive, producing "catastrophic effects - including a fireball, major earthquakes,
> atmospheric clouding, CO2 release, tsunami effects, [and] the extinction of species"
Thank GOD the world's only six-thousand years old. Just imagine!.... :-P
Another hoax! (Score:1)
Few comments (Score:2)
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Rare and Exotic Mineral (Score:1)
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