Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Giant Impact Crater Found In Australia

Posted by timothy on from the convict-labor-can-fill-it-back-in dept.

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!"

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:discovered? by captainpanic · · 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.

  2. Re:discovered? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.