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Normal faults are generated throughout the crater from the impact force. Fault blocks form along the crater walls, breaking off and sliding back into the crater following impact. Rocks around the crater rim fill in much of the crater as it collapses. Furthermore, resurge waves deposit large amounts of rock fragments in and around the crater. It is common for the crater to almost completely refill and subsequently be buried[.]

VLADIMIR Putin has drafted in soldiers to investigate a “collapsed mountain” in a remote region of Siberia amid suggestions it may have been caused by a UFO crash-landing. Whatever the cause, the event resulted in a massive rockfall which has blocked the nearby Bureya river, and left several villages at risk of flooding. So much rock was shifted it would fill 13,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools, say experts. Meanwhile, the falling 34 million cubic metres of debris left a gash in a mountain which could swallow up all the water used if every American showered at the same time. A defence...

The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. The problem lies partly with the moving pole and partly...

Humanity has captured its first clear look at an object in the faraway Kuiper Belt. NASA revealed the first images and science data from this week's historic flyby in a news conference Wednesday afternoon. Far from the blurry 'bowling pin' we saw with New Horizons' first look when it beamed its signal home early morning on January 1, the new images reveal Ultima Thule is snowman-shaped red world with two distinct lobes - one stacked atop the other. This arrangement is what's known as a contact binary, the experts say – and, it’s now the first a spacecraft has...

FR now has Jack-booted Thug Censorship Unbelievable.

At around 12.14 in the afternoon, it will come as close as 15 lunar distances, which is 15-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon (or about 3.7 million miles). TWO asteroids are set to drift uncomfortably close to the Earth on Sunday, with the pair of objects passing the planet within five hours of each other. The largest of the asteroids is estimated to have a diameter as long as 120 metres, making it bigger than most football pitches. What's exciting this time around, however, is that the largest (sexily named "2009 WB105") has an estimated diameter of...

A new study says we may only have another 1.45 billion years to enjoy the dynamic action of Earth’s geologic engine There’s no geological artist quite like Earth’s plate tectonics. Thanks to this ongoing operation, we have mountains and oceans, terrifying earthquakes, incandescent volcanic eruptions, and new land being born every single second. But nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the mantle will cool to such an extent that this planetwide conveyor belt will grind to a halt. At that point, you can say farewell to the carbon cycle, as well as the constant reshaping and reshuffling of landmasses that have been...

... Whether you are superstitious or not, here is everything you need to know about the widely-feared day...

Unexplainable things happened in the Tacoma house where serial killer Ted Bundy grew up. So many things, in fact, that a contractor hired to remodel the home penciled Bible scriptures on the walls and brought in two pastors to bless the house. “I’m not one to believe a lot of this stuff, but this house made me a believer,” said Casey Clopton, the contractor. A cry for help appeared on a window as crew members worked in the basement. Heavy furniture wedged into a wall toppled over. Doors and cabinets seemed to open themselves. It all started in September, when...

Deer are generally considered one of the more benign creatures of the forest, going about their herbivorous ways in peace. But as new research shows, there’s a dark side to these ungulates. Using camera traps, forensic scientists have captured unprecedented photos of deer munching on the skeletal remains of a human carcass. “Herein, we report on the first known photographic evidence of deer gnawing human remains,” write the Texas State University researchers in their new study, which can be found in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. On its own, this behavior is noteworthy enough, but the finding could prove useful...

It's been more than a half a century since the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling found that "separate but equal" has no place in U.S. public schools. And yet, true racial equality in our education system is yet to materialize. That's clear from the startling revelations in the latest Education Department report released Tuesday. Entitled the Civil Rights Data Collection, the survey is conducted biennially. This one surveyed 50 million students in 95,000 schools during the 2013-2014 school year. It shows how much African-American and Latino students still lag in terms of opportunities. The disparity "tears at...

The crew of an Apollo mission to the moon were so startled when they encountered strange music-like radio transmissions coming through their headsets, they didn't know whether or not to report it to NASA, it's been revealed. It was 1969, two months before Apollo 11's historic first manned landing on the moon, when Apollo 10 entered lunar orbit, which included traversing the far side of the moon when all spacecraft are out of radio contact with Earth for about an hour and nobody on Earth can see or hear them. As far as the public knew, everything about the mission...

Anecdotal evidence surrounding Chicago City Council’s Dec. 2, 2014, vote to hike the minimum wage by 58 percent over four and a half years suggests this trend will continue. The owner of the iconic Original Rainbow Cone ice cream shop in Beverley said she would be forced to cut the number of students her business employs over the summer by half. A Panera Bread location cited the hike when it decided to close, as did Home Run Inn pizza when it killed plans to open a new location in Portage Park.

One day the robots may rebel against humans, taking control of the world and turning us into a relatively green source of energy. But today is not that day, even if one such robot did “attack” its owner in South Korea.

As a relative n00b, I remember when I first signed up on FR and being careful not to post anything at first for fear of ***SOB*** FReeper ridicule, that most every Sunday evening, some DUer or other troll would post some stupid, provocative thread just to piss FReepers off.The retaliation by FReepers was immediate and relentless. The troll was soundly over-powered by logic and facts that completely destroyed their point.The Viking kitties emerged and the trolls were soundly zotted into oblivion.Anyhoo, I haven't seen a good, Sunday evening ZOT in awhile. Do you have any favorite ZOTS that you remember?

If you're planning to go to the 2014 Annual Fall Meeting of the American Physical Society in Illinois this Saturday, you might be in for a bit of a surprise with the final talk of the day. Because that's when plasma physicist Dr John Brandenburg will present his theory that an ancient civilisation on Mars was wiped out by a nuclear attack from another alien race. In his bizarre theory, Dr Brandenburg says ancient Martians known as Cydonians and Utopians were massacred in the attack - and evidence of the genocide can still be seen today. Back in 2011 the...

More than 60 years after its last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs still persists in the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan according to a research team led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which confirmed the species presence during recent surveys.

WASHINGTON — Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was not clear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people...

The Defense Department’s inspector general will review the academic investigation of plagiarism allegations against Sen. John Walsh. The Montana Democrat is accused of not properly attributing certain material in a paper to complete his master's degree at the Army War College. Carol Kerr, the school’s spokeswoman, said it would launch an Academic Review Board to look into the matter. The results and any recommendations will be forwarded to the Defense Department IG for its “consideration.” The New York Times first reported last week that a review of a 2007 final paper suggests the decorated Iraq war veteran “appropriated at least...

Last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson was thought to answer a number of questions regarding how particles derive their mass. Now, however, it seems the discovery of the elusive particle is raising more questions than answers. Physicists at King’s College in London now say they have recreated conditions for the Big Bang now with the information from the discovery of the Higgs boson, and they report that the universe should have expanded too quickly and collapsed.