Kebira Crater
Monday, 6th March 2006 by Alex Turnbull
Currently doing the rounds in the mainstream press, this is the recently discovered Kebira meteorite crater in the western desert of Egypt.
At 31 kilometers across Kebira utterly dwarfs Arizona's famous Barringer meteor crater (which is only 1.2 kilometres in diameter), and was only discovered now due to its sheer size - it's too big to recognise from the ground, and the scientists responsible for identifying it only did so using satellite imagery.
For more information see this BBC news article.
Thanks to jher, Paul Drye, david, Keith T. Peter Grabowsky and lookabootye.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
But did they use Google satellite imagery?
Are you sure that it was a meteorit? This
View Placemark
near the crater looks like an alien city.
(response to Mash) Those are normal centre-pivot irrigation fields… but what are those large hexagonal structures? The hexagons and circles dwarf the airstrip in the middle of it too.
Apart from obvious benefit to the likes of us, why on earth are huges swathes of featureless desert covered in high res whilst large areas of western Europe still havent been done?
Er, this is high res? This is normal res, and although I haven’t checked, I think it’s safe to say that those large areas have the same resolution.
West of the town: more duct tape! Zoom out so you can see the town and the crater and you’ll see it.
Do you know what tim? – you are right! What a muppet i am!
Anyone know what this cool blue stuff is, just to the south? Looks really good:
View Placemark
Anyone know what this cool blue stuff is, just to the south? Looks really good:
View Placemark
(I think its water but I have no idea what water is doing other there in the middle of no-where or why its in such funky shapes)
Tha blue water is an extinct volcano Waw An Numus which we posted back in July – if only we’d recognised the Kebira Crater at the time!
I agree with Cookie Monster. It’s totally stupid to have pictures of dessert, etc when they could cover more interesting places in the world.
Edward, I’m not sure what the large hexagons are, but I did find the name of the city (Al Jawf) using Neave.com’s Flash Earth (very handy program) http://www.flashearth.com/ I tried a bit of a search on the city but couldn’t come up with much. Almost looks to me to be a newly developed residential district.