Slashdot Mirror
Tennessee Crater Inches Toward Recognition
tetrahedrassface writes "Slashdot carried the story of an-as-yet unverified impact crater in Tennessee a couple of years ago. After a few weeks of fairly hardcore sample taking, digging, obtaining some good images and manipulating them, I'm proud to report the first batch of evidence in favor of it being an impact site. The primary smoking gun is the presentation of an astrobleme, obtained from High Resolution Ornithographic Images taken in 2008. Also of note are the melted/deformed rocks, magnetic crater dust, and the fitment of the crater rim to a circle. A rented plane and a bunch of photographs today and it's pretty obvious that it's a crater, folks. Cheers!"
He's not proud of the crater, he's proud of all the work he's done to verify that it's a crater. Learn to think before writing and the quality of your post will increase dramatically.
Makes more sense than being proud of a sporting team, when it comes right down to it. Using your talents to "discover" such a wonder is a fantastic thing.
I'm a professional scientist with a pile of published papers, and I'm here to say that amateur science is a very good thing. Who are we to tell young Calvin to turn off his inquisitive mind when he hits puberty? The guy who wrote TFA is a *far* more interesting person than the people who're mocking him.
Now, do I believe that he's right, and this *is* a crater? Nope. I suspect it's wishful thinking. Does his work meet the standards of peer-reviewed scientific literature? Definitely not. Does his work meet the standards of Slashdot? I dunno, does Slashdot have standards? All I can say is I'd rather read articles like this than the Apple flame wars or hackneyed political debates that fill the rest of the news feed.
I fully intend on getting thin sections done. The gravel IS angular. There are heavily deformed Ordovician Age rocks. Unfortunately, where this area is a Karst area. You can't pick up the feature and move it to an area that makes it easier. Is this a Karst feature? I doubt it very seriously. However thin sections for shocked quartz are next on the list. I appreciate the time you took to reply. No topsoil was never pushed into the middle of this feature. Yes, a road was cut in pushing regolith into one corner and making it look a lot squarer than it is. I know the full history behind the site going back over 120 years. There is rounded material i.e. (sand) in the soil around the crater at a microscopic level because the soil is 200+ million years old and already contained HEAVILY WEATHERED ancient rock..
The investigation continues. Thin samples of severely deformed rocks are next.