Comments | beamjockey: Maybe Des Plaines, Illinois, Should Consider Trying This

beamjockey

Maybe Des Plaines, Illinois, Should Consider Trying This

Jan 03, 2006 10:53

A novel way to celebrate the onset of New Year: Wetumpka, Alabama dropped an asteroid at midnight.

The "Asteroid Drop" commemorated the greatest natural disaster of Alabama history. Wetumpka sits on the rim of a large crater. Scientists say it's evidence of a meteor strike some 83 million years ago ( Read more... )

craters, asteroids, alabama, wetumpka

Comments 6

shsilver January 3 2006, 17:09:50 UTC

I like it. billroper and daisyknotwise and all others who live is Des Plaines, start lobbying for next year's meteor drop.

mia_mcdavid January 3 2006, 18:16:32 UTC

But, does Des Plaines have a crater?

beamjockey January 3 2006, 18:37:07 UTC

Yes, of course it does. Five miles wide. (Way bigger than Meteor Crater.) Something like 280 million years old. Centered at the Dempster exit on I-294.

Not a trace on the surface. It's a secret five-mile-wide cosmic impact crater. Which makes it even cooler.

beamjockey beamjockey January 3 2006, 18:48:10 UTC

Dug up (heh) my 1997 newspaper article on this ( ... )

beamjockey January 3 2006, 18:50:57 UTC

(Continued from previous comment ( ... )

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Re: Working on the edge beamjockey January 3 2006, 19:05:22 UTC

The cited report from 1989 may have been from a construction survey - part of the Deep Tunnel system cuts through the east side of the impact site.

Yes, they found the shatter cones in samples from Deep Tunnel drilling.

As for Quatermass, if the buried Martian spaceship hasn't bothered us in 280 million years, it probably won't do so any time soon.