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Vast Asteroid Crater Found In Timor Sea

Posted by kdawson on from the duck-and-cover dept.

An anonymous reader notes the discovery of a 35-million-year-old impact crater in the Timor Sea, northwest of Australia, which helped to usher in a period of significant global cooling. "The new findings, announced today and published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, suggest that the impact could have contributed towards the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet... The minimum size of the dome, which 'represents elastic rebound doming of the Earth crust triggered by the impact' is 50 km across, but the full size of the crater could be significantly larger, [lead researcher Andrew Glikson] told Australian Geographic. 'It would be possibly 100 km.' From the probable diameter of the crater, Andrew estimates that the asteroid which struck the Timor Sea was between 5 and 10 km in size. This impact coincided with a time of heavy asteroid bombardment globally. Several other craters have been documented from a similar time, including one off the WA coast measuring 120 km in diameter. Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size."

4 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Golden Girls! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Thank you for being a friend
    Traveled down the road and back again
    Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

    And if you threw a party
    Invited everyone you ever knew
    You would see the biggest gift would be from me
    And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.

  2. when will people learn??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    When will you nerds learn? The climate on this planet has never changed one bit, and anyone who suggests that it does (I'm looking at you Australian Earth "Scientists") is part of the grand conspiracy.

  3. Re:An asteroid 100km across? Err , I don't think s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I stuck my penis your dads butt, then I sucked him off and tickled his balls. Your mom wanted to play with my penis when I was doing then, but I said no.

  4. total disbelief by OzPeter · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Here we are on slashdot .. an American site (as I keep being told) and the summary is correctly using metric units without translating them to Imperial miles for the consumption of the locals [/sarcasm]

    What the hell is going on, and who replaced slashdot with this site?

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