The Carancas impact event refers to the fall of the Carancas chondritic meteorite on September 15, 2007, near the village of Carancas in Peru, close to the Bolivian border and Lake Titicaca. The impact created a crater and scorched earth around its location. Read more
The Carancas impact event refers to the fall of the Carancas chondritic meteorite on September 15, 2007, near the village of Carancas in Peru, close to the Bolivian border and Lake Titicaca. The impact created a crater and scorched earth around its location. Read more
One of the first scientists to visit the site of a sensational meteor strike in Peru was Lionel Jackson, of the Geological Survey of Canada, who was working nearby when a fireball scorched across the sky over Lake Titicaca a little over a week ago. Back in his Vancouver office yesterday, Dr. Jackson discounted wild theories that clouds of alien viruses were released in the collision or that the foreign body that blasted into the earth, near Carancas, in Peru's Puno province, Sept. 16, was really a spy satellite. Dr. Jackson says there's little doubt the crater left in the muddy ground in a farming district was created by a meteor that came from space "travelling at a number of times the speed of sound." Read more
The meteorite that fell in eastern Peru on September 15, 2007, struck with the energy of two tons of TNT and blasted a 13.5-meterwide crater (seen here about a week after the event). Inset shows the estimated size of the object at impact.
It was an ordinary Saturday morning in Carancas, Peru, a small village along Lake Titicaca only a few kilometres south of the Bolivia-Peru border. Residents of this indigenous rural community were going about life as usual, tending to llamas and sheep, chatting with neighbours in the native Aymara language and preparing for lunch. Little did they know that their lives were about to change. At 11:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2007, a fireball as bright as the sun appeared in the sky above the southern end of Lake Titicaca. Thousands of observers across the region saw it flash across the sky and heard loud explosions.
A small remote town 800 miles from Peru's capital was placed on the map and in the eyes of the world when a meteorite landed and reports that people were feeling ill surfaced. On September 15 2007, a chondrite meteorite landed in Carancas, a town in the southern region of Puno. A chain of events the townspeople will never forget broke out from that moment forward. Glossary