Word: desertion
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...would be another quarter of a million years before the first humans set eyes on the crater. During that time, sand blown on the desert winds filled most of the crater's depth, although its bottom still lies 25 m below the level of the surrounding plain. For thousands of years the local Aborigines in this arid stretch of the southeastern Kimberley region, members of the Jaru and Walmajarri tribes, have known the crater as Kandimalal. Here on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, Dreaming tracks meet and cross, and while traditional ownership is shared between the tribes, their...
...sound barrier. Around it an envelope of ionized gas produces an incandescent fireball, brilliant as the sun, hot enough to vaporize the metal until what's left - as massive as a battleship and some 50m across - drives itself at more than 20,000 km an hour into the desert floor. At the point of impact, monstrous kinetic energy is converted almost instantly into heat, turning the meteorite into a spray of molten metal, pulverizing the ground beneath, fusing sandstone into glass. A crater nearly a kilometer in diameter and 150m deep, its sides molded from softened rock, cools...
...landscapes are in many Aboriginal paintings, as if from above. "He went in here," she says, jabbing at a blue dot slightly off-center. And though the ancient people who first told this story could never have known how close their falling-star story was to scientific truth, the desert's night sky is so black - and the shooting stars so brilliant against it - that even the city-bred feel their imagination expanding...
...dirt road from Halls Creek, through a flat expanse of spinifex and low scrub. This Tanami Track, if you had a couple of days to spare, would lead you to Alice Springs, near the center of the continent, but instead the amateur crater hunter turns left into the desert. Twenty km on, the rim comes into view. Its 35-m slopes seem high after a few hours of traveling in only two dimensions, but a brief scramble over the rocks puts you on the lip. A wedge-tailed eagle, glossy black against the sunburnt sky, patrols the circumference in majestic...
...Tempting, but foolish. Marvel at the emptiness of the desert plain, but remember, Barbara Sturt and her people can find waterholes and billabongs here in a landscape that could kill the rest of us in hours. That kind of knowledge, you suspect, takes more than one lifetime to acquire...