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Post Info TOPIC: Odessa crater


L

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RE: Odessa crater
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Odessas meteor crater draws thousands of visitors per year but now pieces of the meteor are drawing thousands of dollars on Ebay.
The meteorite strike was 50 times as powerful as one hydrogen bomb and would have easily wiped out what is now downtown Odessa.
Visitors come from all over the country to see the countrys second largest meteor crater.

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L

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The Odessa Crater, and four smaller craters were formed in prehistoric time when a great shower of nickel-iron Meteorites collided with the earth. It is estimated the event occurred some 24000 to 25000 years ago.
The shower was composed of many thousand of individual Meteorites of various sizes which fell over an area of about 2 square miles. The smaller Meteorites, which were by far the most numerous, either came to rest on the earths surface or at the bottom of shallow impact pits within the soil. There were several very large Meteoritic masses in the shower, however, and these struck the earth with such enormous energy that they penetrated deeply into bedrock producing craters in the earth at the places of impact.
When freshly formed, the craters were funnel-shaped depressions, the largest about 550 feet in diameter and 1OO feet in depth. More than 100,000 cubic yards of crushed rock was ejected from this crater by the energy released from the impacting Meteoritic mass. Smaller craters in the vicinity of the main crater range from 15 feet to 70 feet in diameter and from 7 feet to 18 feet in depth.

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L

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The Odessa crater was formed by a spectacular collision with our planet of an iron meteorite 63,500 years ago.

The Odessa meteorite, named after the town ten miles southwest in western Texas not far from the southeastern corner of New Mexico carved out five clustered craters, four small ones and a larger one. The largest is about 525 feet across and nearly 100 feet deep.

Discovered in 1921, it was only the second meteorite crater identified in the United States. Thousands of fragments of the meteorite have been found, including some in 1935 using one of the world’s first metal detectors. The largest recovered so far weighs 300 pounds, and the fragments have a combined weight of more than 10 tons.
They are composed of about 90 percent iron, 8 percent nickel and a smattering of other elements. A lot of research has been done on those pieces, but some recently published research investigated the craters and the surrounding area to get an idea of what the impact was like.


31°45'21.44"N 102°28'45.42"W

It would have been a spectacular event for anyone — or anything — around to see it. Animals living in the area at that time, which was open, semiarid grassland much as it is today, included mammoths, horses, bison and camels.
Hitting the atmosphere at 25,000 to 38,000 mph, the meteorite fragmented. The impact produced winds of more than 600 mph and severely damaged everything within 2 miles. Any animals within that zone were probably killed instantly. The energy released was equivalent to a magnitude 3.1 earthquake.

Some researchers have proposed that the Odessa meteorite and the one that made the more famous Barringer Crater (also known as Meteor Crater) near Winslow, Arizona, were part of the same fall. Both are quite recent impacts, as these things go, and both were made by the same kind of meteorite.

The new dating of the Odessa impact shows that was not the case, however. The Barringer Crater formed 50,000 years ago, about 13,000 years after Odessa.

Adapted from source

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