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Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

The Search for the Missing Amazon Meteor Wed Sep 25, 9:27 AM ET By Diana Jong Staff Writer, SPACE.com The Araona people wanted $1 million before they would let the NASA ( news - web sites) scientists pass through their territory in the remote Bolivian Amazon. Given a budget of $20,000 for their entire expedition, the scientists resorted to negotiating, and the indigenous people eventually agreed to a payment of $500, plus 500 rounds of .22 ammunition and 200 D-cell batteries. "They couldn't be Eveready; they had to be Rayovac," recalls Compton Tucker, an earth scientist from NASA's Goddard Space...

Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there. The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter. In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a...

Comets and disaster in the Bronze AgeCosmic impact is gaining ground as an explanation of the collapse of civilisations, writes Benny Peiser At some time around 2300BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age societies in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more...

Perusal of an article about Saddam Hussein's canal-building projects has led a scientist to a startling discovery about the mysterious collapse of Middle East civilisations more than 4,000 years ago. Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, saw on satellite images of southern Iraq a large circular depression which he believes is a meteor crater. If confirmed, it would indicate an impact equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs, causing devastating fires and flooding in an area which would have been shallow sea at the time. The discovery could explain why so many early cultures went into ...

Thursday, 26 July, 2001, 12:12 GMT 13:12 UK Disaster that struck the ancients The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom had built the mightiest legacy of the ancient world - the pyramids at Giza. But after nearly a thousand years of stability, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years. What happened, and why, has remained a huge controversy. But Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues. His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. ...

Ancient Rome's fish pens confirm sea-level fears 09:30 16 August 04 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. Coastal fish pens built by the Romans have unexpectedly provided the most accurate record so far of changes in sea level over the past 2000 years. It appears that nearly all the rise in sea level since Roman times has happened in the past 100 years, and is most likely the result of human activity. Sea-level change is a measure of the relative movement between land and sea surfaces. Tide-gauge records show that the sea level has...