Possible humongous impact crater in Africa
Thad Floryan
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8526093.stm>
Enter "Omeonga Democratic Republic of the Congo" in Google
Earth's "Fly To" box to see it; may work in GMaps, too.
Dan Birchall
Yep, works in GMaps too. Interesting topography; on the "Terrain"
view the ring is pretty visible too, but it looks like a pretty
small variation in elevation.
--
djb@ | Dan Birchall, Night Operation Assistant, Subaru Telescope/NAOJ.
naoj | Views I express are my own, obviously not those of my employer.
.org | Our atmospheric inversion layer keeps silly people below 3000m.
Brad Guth
wrote:
After each of the ten largest impact events, life as we might have
known it would have been terminated or at least made unbearable for a
considerable time, and thereby each species pretty much having to fend
for itself and essentially start over. Even as of a somewhat recent
glancing sucker-punch from behind, of an encounter by an icy Selene of
perhaps 8e22 kg as of roughly 12,900 BP would have terminated the
majority of human life existing at the time, as well as having
traumatized most of everything else to death or at least near
extinction.
If this 8e22 kg icy rear-end encounter of something similar happened
today, chances are that 99.9% of all life on Earth would vanish (much
of it without any trace), and perhaps another 99.9% of those initial
survivors would not last but a few years, leaving one out of a million
per given species as a survivor. Exoskeletal types like the nearly
immortal cockroach and tough little ants would have likely survived
the best.
~ BG