The impact feature is relatively small

Jul 23, 2010 07:50 GMT  ·  By

Experts are puzzled at a discovery recently made in the Egyptian desert. The area revealed a pristinely-preserved crater, which looks as if it was made on the Moon or Mars. Generally, impact features made on Earth are eroded by a host of natural processes, whereas the other two celestial bodies tend to preserve their scars in perfect shape. Scientists who got a chance to look at the newly-found crater say that the feature preserves even minute details, which have never been seen before at other impact sites on the planet, Space reports. Details of the discovery are published in the July 23 issue of the esteemed journal Science.

“This crater is really a kind of beauty because it's so well-preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth's crust. It's so nice. It's so neat. There is something extraordinary about it,” says meteorite curator Luigi Folco, the leader of the new investigation. He holds an appointment at the Siena, Italy-based Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide. According to an announcement made on Thursday, the crater has been dubbed Kamil. The feature retains the vast majority of its initial features, including the rays that ejected materials usually produce immediately around an impact site.

“The first real impression when we were in the field – we could see with our eyes that it was really well preserved and a potential source of detailed information about this kind of event,” the expert adds. The team he lead traveled to the Sahara Desert some five months ago, and was puzzled by Kamil right away. The feature was first observed by a former curator of the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale, in Milan, Italy. Vincenzo de Michele was peering over Google Earth satellite photographs, and saw the interesting feature. He then announced his colleagues, who decided to follow up on the finding.

Kamil is only 45 meters (148 feet) wide, and is shaped like a bowl. According to measurements, it would appear that the space object which made the indentation in the Earth's crust had an iron core. Scientists believe that the body was traveling at about 7,920 miles per hour (11,732 kph), and that it had a diameter of about 1.3 meters, or about 4.3 feet. “This is important because small impacts are rather frequent on Earth – on the order of one event every 10 to 100 years. So studying this crater is a good opportunity for scientists to get to a correct assessment of the hazard small impacts pose to the Earth and to devise mitigation strategies,” Folco believes.