Discovery
In 1990, Captain Ruben Lianza of the Argentine Air Force, an amateur astronomer, provided a report to an astronomy publication that included aerial pictures of a set of odd teardrop-shaped depressions near the city of Río Cuarto, Córdoba in north-central Argentina. The depressions seemed very similar to the sets of craters produced in laboratory simulations of impacts taking place at low angles. Such features exist on the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but had not been seen on Earth up to that time.
The depressions had long been known to Argentine geologists, but until Lianza, nobody had seriously investigated them. Samples of materials obtained from the depressions indicated the presence of shocked materials, as well as pebbles that were clearly of meteoritic origin. A team of American researchers went to Argentina to investigate, collaborating with Captain Lianza and Argentine academics to study the strange depressions.
There were ten depressions, four of them of substantial size. One crater, named the "Drop", was about 200 meters wide and 600 meters long. Two more large craters, the "Eastern Twin" and "Western Twin", both about 700 meters wide and 3.5 kilometers long, were located 5 kilometers to the northeast. Another major crater, the "Northern Basin", about half and again as big as one of the Twins, was sited 11 kilometers further to the northeast. The long axes of the craters all pointed to the northeast.
Read more about this topic: Rio Cuarto Craters
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“The new supplants the old. Yet men’s minds are stuffed with outworn bunk. Educating the young in the latest findings of authorities and scholars in the social sciences is important. It is equally important to devise ways and means for aiding the middle-aged and old to reexamine hang-over unscientific doctrines and ideas in the light of recent discovery and research.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)