Word: flatted
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...Stutchbury's a digger by trade. Not of earth or stone, but of secrets and deals, happenings and plans, of the movements and moments that can change governments, societies and the way people think. It's what journalists can unearth that drives the Australian newspaper's editor; "lifting those flat rocks and seeing what creepy crawlies are under there," as he puts it. Stutchbury sits at a desk buried in paper, blinds drawn, looking out over his newsroom, a large, open-spaced office filled with clocks, cluttered desks, chattering televisions and people hunched intently over computers, fingers punching at keyboards...
...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 in the flat, hitherto featureless, landscape...
...trip to the crater is hard and hot: 150 km of corrugated red 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...
...Early morning and the temperature is already creeping into the 30s. A brisk breeze coming off the plains feels like a fan-forced oven. But there's no wind 60 m below, where the flat bowl of the crater is still and stifling, almost steamy from the moisture trapped in the sinkholes and fractures beneath the sand. The inside face is steeper. The rocks slip and clatter, startling ring-tailed dragon lizards that jut their jaws at the intruder in seeming defiance. A balancing hand placed carelessly into the spinifex needles is rewarded with a dozen tiny dots of blood...
...meticulous preparation, about which the average fan has little idea. "A lot of them think it's a case of just flinging open the gates," says event-day office supervisor Gary Walshe, who started working at the ground as a ticket seller in 1977. "But there are people going flat out to get the place ready...