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The stage will be located in southeastern Wyoming, in the United States, in an area where dozens of impact craters have been found, all of them formed around 280 million years ago. In a recent article published in the 'Geological Society of America Bulletin' (GSA Bulletin) a team of German and North American researchers, headed by Thomas Kenkmann, from the German University of Freiburg, explained that these craters, between 10 and 70 meters in diameter, it will be created after the impact of a meteorite a hundred miles away, launching a large number of rocks through the areas, which returned after falling to the ground in a cascade. When a
space rock collides with a planet or moon, material ejected from the surface created a crater. Large blocks of that material can form their own 'holes' in the ground.
"The trajectories -explains KenKmann- indicate a single source and how the craters were formed by blocks ejected from a large primary crater. Secondary craters around larger craters are well known on other planets and moons, but have never been found on Earth." Without further ado, the Changed China 4 mission studied a region on the far side of the Moon where this phenomenon was observed around four 'source craters': Finsen, Von Kármán L, Von Kármán L' and Antoniadi.
Kerkmann and his team have already identified 31 secondary craters in Wyoming that leave no room for doubt, but they also found another sixty that they have not yet been able to relate to the main crater.
The story began in 2018, when Kenkmann and his colleagues investigated a series of craters around Douglas, Wyoming. At that time, we thought that all of them were made up of different fragments of the same plan space that had broken up in the atmosphere. But later he discovered several dozen more groups of craters of the same age, dotted throughout the region.
According to the study, the rocks that form the secondary craters must have been between 4 and 8 meters in diameter, and fell to the ground at speeds of between 2.520 and 3.600 km/h. Extrapolation of the trajectories of the impactors over putative sources suggests that the original, undiscovered crater extends halfway to the Wyoming-Nebraska border north of Cheyenne.
According to the team, that crater was probably between 50 and 65 kilometers wide, and was created by an impactor between 4 and 5,4 kilometers in diameter. According to the researchers, the main crater was probably buried a few more kilometers from the sediments that accumulated after the moment of impact. An equivalent amount of sediment, however, will erode and expose the secondary craters when, much later, the Sierra Rocosa is uplifted.
However, Kenkmann believes that this main crater could be located by studying the magnetic and gravitational fields of the region in case of anomalies that reveal its presence.
