Word: crater
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...likely to take place 268 million miles away, when a probe fired from the Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to collide with Comet Tempel 1, a nine-mile-long rock roaring through space at 66,880 m.p.h. The planned cosmic crack-up will gouge out a football-field-size crater and may be visible from the U.S. Pacific Coast and points west. It may also reveal a lot about the chemistry of comets, fossils of the early solar system...
...impactor to free-fly the last 500,000 miles. If all goes well, the probe and comet should collide at 1:52 a.m. E.T. on July 4, producing the same explosive bang as 4.5 tons of TNT. The mother ship, trailing a safe 310 miles behind, will photograph the crater and analyze the debris field thrown...
...impactor strikes the comet at a relative speed of 23,000 m.p.h., annihilating itself and gouging out a crater that could be up to 14 stories deep...
...slowly dissolved a surface layer of limestone. Now Geologist Edward J. Petuch, 36, of Florida International University in Miami, has another idea. In a report to the Geological Society of America's national convention in Orlando, he suggested that the Everglades are the mud-filled remains of an impact crater left by an asteroid that struck the earth 38 million years ago and punched a hole in the ancient seabed, which then lay under 600 ft. of water...
Citing evidence from bore samples taken in southern Florida, Petuch says that, after impact, coral began to grow on the raised rim of the crater, forming a circular atoll-like formation. Later, when the sea level rose, the atoll gradually elongated into an ellipse as the coral (which seeks warm waters) migrated toward the shallows north of the original crater. Some 1.8 million years ago, the atoll contained an inland sea continually replenished by ocean waters. But as the rising coral walls gradually closed out the ocean, newly deposited sediments' piled up in the forming lagoon. The inland sea shrank...