Word: crater
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Police say the man killed in the blast was probably himself carrying the bomb because the device went off about a three feet from the ground, blowing out surrounding car windows but not causing a crater. "The man completely lost his hand. He surely did this when he was handling the explosive device," Mexico City Police Chief Joel Ortega told reporters...
...edge of a dirt crater 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep, Lieutenant Shawn Spainhour and Sheikh Dawood Rashid al-Shuhaib stare down in silence at the wreckage. In August 2007, the U.S. military bombed the sheikh's house, obliterating it with a 500-lb. JDAM "bunker buster." The rest of the village was flattened by artillery. Spainhour, in full battle gear - flak jacket, helmet, knife, guns, boots, camouflage and radio - turns to the grief-stricken, 60-year-old sheikh, who is wearing resplendent traditional Arab dress, and asks his translator to tell him that "I sincerely apologize for everything...
...event itself, however, will have plenty of precedent. The craters that pock the surface of Mars, the Moon, Mercury and other Solar System bodies come from about four billion years' worth of this sort of thing. Earth has had plenty of collisions too; it's just that erosion, continental drift and vegetation have erased or hidden most of them. Not all, though: Meteor Crater, in Arizona, was blasted out some 50,000 years ago by an asteroid about the same size as 2007 WD5. A much bigger object, a few miles across, is thought by many scientists...
...plowed through the atmosphere. (UFO enthusiasts have long been convinced it was a flying saucer that somehow made it across trillions of miles of interstellar space safely, only to blow up above Russia.) The scientific explanation would account for the aerial explosion, and also the fact that no crater has been found...
Except that now maybe it has. An Italian team has measured seismic waves reflecting off a high-density spot in the bottom of the suspiciously crater-shaped Lake Cheko, which lies close to the event's ground zero. It could be a piece of the original object - and finding it could help investigators understand exactly what happened a century...