Google Earth finds an untouched meteorite impact crater

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Every person on this platen who is familiar with the internet knows Google Earth.
It didn't it was so famous amoung the people across the world untill i came to know some amazing stats about it.Here are a few......

• Over 350million downloads(its actually an old data)
  
• Its in 13 languages
• more than a third of the world's land surface in high resolution imagery
• half of the world's population in high res

Its always been a kind of fun to explore the earth via google earth.Now google earth has has made an astonishing discovery.A pristine meteorite impact crater has been found in a remote area of the Sahara desert in southwest Egypt.The crater was originally noticed on Google Earth images, and is believed to be only a few thousand years old.

Karmil which is the name of the crater and it is 45m wide and 16m deap.It was probably formed the impact of an iron meteorite and it was first noticed on google earth images in 2008 by Vincenzo de Michele, former curator of the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale, in Milan, Italy.

The rim of the crater is three meters high and is surrounded by spokes or rays of light-colored material blasted out of the crater by the impact. Folco said “rayed craters” are extremely rare on Earth but common on Mars or the moon, where the sparse atmosphere provides fewer environmental processes to erode them. On Earth such rays or spokes are usually eroded or covered quickly.

Scientists travelled to the site to confirm the discovery last year.They have made an year long search and study of the meteorite crator and they have returned this february with handful of solid proofs and findings.They have located over 5,000 pieces of iron meteorite, weighing 1.7 tonnes in total, and they estimate the original meteorite was around 1.3 meters wide, weighed 5-10 tonnes, and hit the Earth at about 3.5 kilometers per second, causing most of its material to vaporize.

Folco said the crater is so well-preserved it will provide a lot of information on small-scale meteorite impacts.s. There are only 176 confirmed impact craters on the
Earth's surface and only 15 of them are smaller than 300m in diameter.This new crator will help scientists to study about the small meteorite. Such impacts occur about once every 10-100 years, and most small meteorites burn up as they enter the atmosphere and do not reach the ground.

The team also analyzed samples of soil and glass formed by fusion of sand at the site. They hope these analyses will help them pinpoint the age of the crater, and preliminary results suggest the meteorite probably hit no earlier than 5,000 years ago, which is recent on the geological time scale.

The co-ordinates of the Karmil crater are 22º 01' 06" N 26º 05' 15" E.See for yourself.......