Lloyd wrote: On the north side looks like a long rille running from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Yes, this is a rift going to the great lakes.
mharratsc
Re: Does this look like a crater?
Ya know, Jeff-
You might be right about that having once been a crater... and also they are probably right about that being a rille running up from the oceanic basin. Then you would probably be further correct with the little Lichtenburg figurine bays and channels from that point, and also there was more of the same effect further in on the highlands as well.
All of these, even together, are not unusual from an electrical explanation. You see the same effects across other solar bodies as well. Craters over rilles, vice versa, rilles up and over highlands, dendritic channels running away from larger geological features.
Pretty neat that you live at Ground Zero of an electrical catastrophe event!
If that was a hoax there would have been signs of excavating equipment tearing up the surrounding, undisturbed terrain, but there was none that I could see in any of the several images I've seen of this event.
I'll bet that videographer starts having some health issues in the near future after breathing all those vapors, which can be seen condensing on, and wiped off, the lens of the camera.
I'm more interested in the shape of the crater as a comparison to the flat, steep sided, nearly perfectly round craters seen on every rocky body in the solar system. This crater really isn't like that, from what I can tell, because it's an impact, not EDM.
just my 2c's
redeye
Re: Impact crater or something else...
I personally suspect "hoax" but.... take a look.
I was just about to post this, glad I checked first. Burning crater?
Bolides are cold when they reach the ground. The heat could conceivably come from a mechanical impact, but such an impact would leave a crater larger than 15m. Hoax I think.
Cheers!
solrey
Re: Impact crater or something else...
Have either of you ever operated any sort of excavator or worked with explosives? I have, many times. Making a hole that size would either require a seriously heavy machine on tracks, which would totally tear up the ground around the perimeter of the hole, or a shaped explosive charge which would produce a more symmetrical hole with debris accelerated much further away from the hole. There is no evidence for either of those two scenario's. A hoax of that extent leaving no traces would likely require resources unattainable by poor Latvian farmers. That's not just my 2c's, that's an expert analysis, based on my, somewhat extensive, experience with excavating equipment and demolitions.
If it's a hoax, how did they pull it off without leaving evidence?
redeye
Re: Impact crater or something else...
If it's a hoax, how did they pull it off without leaving evidence?
I used to dig graves. You could dig that in a few hours if you had a few people. The crater is in Latvia, if you look at the cars in the background of the photos you can see the sort of equipment they have over there. Ladas and Trabants. I don't know how easy, or expensive, it would be to get a hold of a JCB.
Cheers!
mharratsc
Re: Impact crater or something else...
I find it odd that there was something producing visible flames in the bottom of the crater... meaning it wasn't just something that was smoking hot/radiating heat. That makes me think 'hoax'. Also, an investigator from the local university said that he thought someone had "dug it with a shovel".
What makes me doubt the 'hoax factor' is that the crater seems to be quite symmetrical, the surroundings do not seem to contain the volume of dirt that had to have been excavated.
Therefore- I'm not convinced that it was a meteor, but I also don't think it was excavated by hand, either.
I wonder if that was an incendiary artillery shell that was buried to some depth and fired off, or else landed with a delayed fuse? Might give off that more conical sort of blast pit vs a the big scoop shape of an HE round, ya think? Would also explain the stuff in the bottom of the thing that was still on fire, too. Sure had the reddish color and short licks of flame you'd see with burning magnesium, and the smoke...
Found where they put the dirt they dug outta the hole... :
Sigh...
Mike H.
solrey
Re: Impact crater or something else...
I stand corrected.
They must be pretty bored to put that much effort into digging a hole that size just for a hoax.
SirWilhelm
Re: Impact crater or something else...
Have you seen the Blackberry commercial where lightening strikes the ground twice? I thought it was very interesting that the strikes create a crater! I wonder where they got that idea?
As for the hoax, the kids in my neighborhood did get that bored one time and dug a pretty good sized hole in my cousin's back yard. We went for deep rather than wide and round though. It appeared to me that the hole in the middle of the hoax crater was empty when they examined it in daylight. I assume that means the burning material in the video consumed itself, I don't believe meteors do that, do they? Apparantly they did go to all that trouble for a hoax.
Ion01
Re: Impact crater or something else...
The hoax was for marketing purposes.
Asgard
Aboriginal Folklore Leads to Discovery of Electric Craters
he was open-minded enough to look for information of this nature in such an unlikely source but unfortunately his incomplete understanding of all of the forces that are involved in the creation of these features has left him somewhat mystified at his discovery.
SYDNEY: An Australian Aboriginal 'Dreaming' story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory.
Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist studying Aboriginal astronomy at Sydney's Macquarie University, used Google Maps to search for the signs of impact craters in areas related to Aboriginal stories of stars or stones falling from the sky.
One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.
Cosmic impact
The crater is 280 m in diameter and about 30 m deep. Magnetic and gravitational data collected from the site show the crater is bowl-shaped below the surface and was likely caused by a meteorite a few metres in diameter.
"There is no other way to explain this than as a cosmic impact," said Hamacher. "It couldn't have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area."
Macquarie University co-worker, Craig O'Neill, added that a tiny amount of 'shocked quartz' had also been found at the site. "These were very rare, but only form if a rock has experienced a shock blast like that from a nuclear bomb or meteorite impact," he said.
The research is described in papers Hamacher is preparing for submission to the journals Archaeoastronomy and Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
Crater spotting
Despite the link to the Dreaming story, weathering and the absence of meteorite fragments suggest that the crater is millions of years old and humans could not possibly have witnessed the event, Hamacher said.
Another crater at Gosse's Bluff, 170 km west of Alice Springs, is 140 million years old, and is also the subject of an Arrernte Dreaming story about a "cosmic baby" which fell to Earth.
Instead, Hamacher thinks Arrernte Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley and Gosse's Bluff craters. One more recent example of craters created by an impact are the Henbury craters, 70 km from Palm Valley and just 4,000 years old.
