- "The force of the blast was more
than if you took 10 times all the nuclear weapons on Earth at the height
of the Cold War, piled them in one spot and set them off."
-
-
- MANSON, Iowa -- As "Armageddon" hits the big screen, it isn't
going to make a deep impact among folks here: They already have their own
extraterrestrial claim to fame in the form of a 24-mile-wide crater formed
some 74 million years ago when a huge meteorite slammed into north-central
Iowa and turned the region into a giant killing field.
-
- Geologists say it's the second-largest
crater in the continental United States and 15th-largest in the world.
-
- "Armageddon," the asteroid-vs.-Earth
movie that is in the middle of its debut weekend, has been heavily promoted
across the nation. And "Deep Impact" has grossed $135.8 million
since its debut May 8.
-
- But in Manson, a town of 1,924 people
that doesn't even have a movie theater, nobody much cares.
-
- "I'm not into that kind of stuff,"
said Ann Schlapkohl, the librarian at the Manson Community Library. "The
real thing is in our back yard."
-
- Bernadine Zehl, who helped the town kick
off its inaugural Crater Days celebration last weekend, agrees: "This
was a natural happening. It wasn't anything conjured up by Hollywood --
or even Steven Spielberg."
-
- The Manson Impact, as geologists call
it, was the real, horrible thing.
-
- "Basically, anything alive in the
central part of North America would have been killed by the shock wave,"
said Ray Anderson, a geologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources
Geological Survey. "The electromagnetic pulse -- the heat from the
blast that went out -- would have basically set everything in the state
of Iowa on fire in an instant. ... All the dinosaurs in the central part
of the United States would have been killed by that blast."
-
- In the continental United States, only
the crater left by a meteorite 35 million years ago at Chesapeake Bay is
larger than the Manson Impact, according to Peter Schultz, a geology professor
at Brown University.
-
- At Manson, Anderson theorizes the meteorite
was traveling at 60,000 mph when it hit. The impact was about 3 1/2 miles
deep, and as it bore into the earth, the sides of the crater were lifted
1 1/2 miles high from the earth's surface.
-
- "The force of the blast was more
than if you took 10 times all the nuclear weapons on Earth at the height
of the Cold War, piled them in one spot and set them off," Anderson
said.
-
- Besides the environmental devastation,
the blast turned topsy-turvy the rock formations below the Earth's surface
in the Manson area.
-
- Granite and other rocks normally found
several thousand feet below ground were brought up to within less than
200 feet of the surface and were discovered after the turn of this century,
Anderson said.
-
- With all that destruction, no telltale
signs of the huge crater exist.
-
- Glacial deposits have filled in the crater
while erosion has leveled it off, Anderson said. What would be the lip
of the crater is about 200 feet below the rich farmland, he said.
-
- "Researchers have used satellite
imagery, radar imagery, everything. But there is no surface expression,"
Anderson said.
-
- That leaves the locals wondering how
to show off their extraterrestrial prize.
-
- "Every once in a while someone will
come to town and expect to see the crater, or they want a piece of the
meteorite," said Schlapkohl, the librarian. "It's really hard
to explain to them that there's really nothing to see."
|
Sightings HomePage