Posted on 10/17/2004 9:26:51 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The collision happened around 870 000 years ago, a time when Homo erectus, man’s early ancestor, was still roaming the planet. Molten asteroid slabs melted through more than 1.5 kilometres of ice and snow to reach the underlying bedrock... Billions of tons of ice, snow and rock would have been vaporised and thrown into the atmosphere. Rock particles that fell to the ground have been located more that 5 000 kilometres away in Australia. The impact was so immense that it is being considered as the cause of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic polarity around this time. One enormous asteroid crater measuring 320 kilometres across, 100 kilometres wide and 500 metres deep has long been known to be underneath the Antarctic ice and snow, since being discovered in 1960. Using new satellite technology to help detect magnetic anomalies, scientists located up to five new impact craters. Three of them are on the continental land mass and two more are in the Weddell Sea.
(Excerpt) Read more at nearearthobjects.co.uk ...
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