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!"
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.