A rimmed, bowl-shaped pit produced by a…
1891 CE
Five hundred and fifty feet deep, and two point four miles in circumference, "twenty football games could be played simultaneously on its floor, while more than two million spectators observed from its sloping sides."
The object, probably one hundred feet (thirty meters) in diameter, weighing sixty-three thousand metric tons and traveling five to ten miles miles per second (eight to sixteen kilometers per second), releases energy on impact equivalent to 3.5 million tons of TNT.
Most of the object vaporizes, but blasts out a bowl-shaped depression six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) deep and four thousand feet (twelve hundred meters) in diameter, surrounded by a rim one hundred and sixty feet (fifty meters) high.
Drillings reveal undisturbed rock beneath seven hundred to eight hundred feet of fill.
The strata forming the rim of the crater are upturned and covered with the debris of the same bedrock, which shows an inverted stratigraphy.
Its age has been variously estimated at between five thousand and fifty thousand years, but most researchers incline towards the earlier date.
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Northern North America
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