By the Slithering Goo! This whole blog thing has been a nightmare of chaos and confusion. First the old blog site gets “deactivated” and while it’s totally my fault for not bookmarking the pages needed I can’t help but project my frustrations on my hosting site.
So now I’m on WordPress, and there seems to be a lag in refresh when editing styles, add to that the default theme is a css mess. And of course, I edit the styles and upload my own image files and then upgrade to the current version of WordPress and well, wouldn’t you know it…it reverts all files to the originals for the theme and so commence round two of editing and uploading.
So here we are, Brave New World, and two very cool things have been discovered (which I learned about via Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog, here and here); the first is an asteroid impact crater in the Democratic Republic of Congo which was just discovered, and reported by the BBC, because of the deforestation going on in the area.
DR Congo crater via Google Maps
It hasn’t been confirmed as a impact crater as of yet, and it’s possible other events caused the feature, but it’s “likely.” It’s around 40 km across (~25 miles)! It’s akin to standing on one side of the Rim in San Francisco and seeing San Carlos on the opposite side. For a sense of scale, Meteor Crater in Arizona is “just” one kilometer (~0.7 miles) across, and here’s an overlay of the San Francisco area over the Congo crater.
San Francisco overlay on Congo Crater (images Google Earth)
So of course, in less than a week news comes out that an amateur geologist finds a Colombian crater (though “amateur” in this case means Max Rocca was skilled enough to a ) get research funding from The Planetary Society and b ) find a bloody 30 to 50 km crater!).
Vichada crater (Google Earth image)
Imagine the power, the energy released when these craters were created! For comparison, take the Sedan Crater, the largest man-made crater in the U.S. A 104 kiloton underground nuclear blast…
Sedan Crater, NV. Google Earth image
And it’s “only” ~0.4 km in diameter!
These uber-impacts are just awesomely awe-inspiring awesome; signs that Earth’s past wasn’t as peaceful and static as it is now (and by peaceful and static I mean only a few cm a year continental “drift”, 8.0 earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and so on and so on) and that there still exists the possibility of a mega-asteroid make-out session sometime in the future.
