A Norwegian family make it at their cabin to open it up for the spring and found a surprise : a large rock had smashed through the roof . It was key as a 1.3 pound breccia meteorite . It did n’t hurt anybody , and its cut-rate sale price should easy plow the damage to the roof ; meteorite are valuable to aggregator . But although most meteorites are very small , and to date nobody has been more than bruised by one , some of them are giving and make a fierce impression where they hit . Here are a few of the more interesting wallop craters around :
Barringer Crater, Arizona, USA
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Also jazz as " Meteor Crater , " this was the first crater place , due to its relatively pristine appearing . It ’s young , as craters go – just 50,000 years old – and it was created by a atomic number 28 - iron meteorite about 50 meters across , excavate a volcanic crater about 1.2 klick across .
Obolon' Crater, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine
Not all volcanic crater are so obvious ; sometimes their structure is only apparent in aerial views . Obolon ' Crater was detected from the presence of shocked mineral in the surrounding , a tell - story sign of an impact upshot . It ’s 20 km across and is count on to be about 169 million years sometime , though there is some grounds it may be quite a bit old . ( More on that next . )
Manicouagan Crater, Quebec, Canada
Visible from blank space as a pack - shaped lake , this 100 km multi - reverberate crater ( with a 70 km central ring that is now Manicouagan Reservoir ) was created by the impingement of a 5 klick asteroid about 216 million days ago . What ’s interesting about this crater is that , if you report for plate tectonics and then roll the clock back about 216 million years , this crater has an eerily accurate alignment with several other craters : Rochechouart in France , St. Martin in Manitoba , Obolon ' in the Ukraine , and Red Wing crater in North Dakota . All of these crater may have been produced by a meteor railroad train , the effect of an object separate up due to tidal forces or collisions .
Gosses Bluff Crater, Northern Territory, Australia
What ’s left of this one is only 5 km across , but that ’s really only the central uplift that is found in some larger crater ; the prohibited flange has mostly eroded away . This crater date back about 142 million years . The local Aborigines regard it as hallowed and , interestingly , give it an origin story hinting at its straight origins : their story is that the fry of the cockcrow and evening champion fell out of the sky and arrive at the Earth in this spot ; the shape of the bluff is evocative of its origin .
Karakul Crater, Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan
This relatively unseasoned crater ( between 5 and 25 million years old ) is in Tajikistan and feature a with child lake at its center . The overall depression is 52 km across .
Sudbury Basin, Ontario, Canada
This highly elliptical and also frighteningly large shock volcanic crater is difficult to see ; it is shallow ( the blow was a glancing one ) and is heavy erode and for the most part covered in vegetation . There is a large lake at one end , and the human body of it is inexpertly visible as human settlement has been mostly in the valley . The impactor would have been about 10 - 15 kilometre in sizing , and struck the Earth about 1.849 billion years ago .
Vredefort Crater, Free State Province, South Africa
Sudbury is big , but it ’s not the biggest . At 300 klick across , Vredefort is the magnanimous reassert encroachment volcanic crater on Earth . It ’s also the second oldest , at a little over 2 billion years of age . This impactor was probably 5 - 10 km , but traveling on a more verbatim course than the one that created Sudbury .
Chicxulub Crater, Yucatan, Mexico
This is not the large crater on Earth , and you’re able to not see it at all from the airfoil . But it ’s one of the most famous , because this is the one wide suspected to have done in the dinosaurs . It ’s 180 km across , and the impactor is believed to have been at least 10 km across , striking Earth with a personnel of about 96 teratons of TNT . Geologic evidence indicates that the region was entirely underwater at the clock time , and it would have produced a phenomenal tsunami .
[ Gravity mapcreated from public information by Milan Studio and released through Wikimedia Commons . ]
