One day within the last several thousand years, a rare metallic meteorite travelling over 12 000 km/hour smashed into Earth's surface near what is today the trackless border region between Egypt, Sudan and Libya. The impact of the 1.3 m, 10-tonne chunk of iron generated a fireball and plume that would have been visible over 1000 km away, and drilled a hole 16 m deep and 45 m wide into the rocky terrain.

Since then, the crater had sat undisturbed by Earth's geologic and climatic processes, which usually render all but the very largest terrestrial impact craters invisible. It was also, as far as is recorded, unseen by humans.

Searching for craters in Google Earth

But that changed in 2008, when the crater was spotted during a Google Earth study conducted by mineralologist Vincenzo De Michele, then with the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale in Milan, Italy. He was searching for natural features, when by chance he saw the rounded impact crater on his PC screen.

De Michele contacted an astrophysicist, Dr Mario Di Martino, at the INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics) observatory in Turin, who, together with Dr Luigi Folco, of Siena's Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide, organised an expedition to the site in February this year.

It took over a year to plan and obtain permissions for the journey; in the meantime, and in collaboration with Telespazio, e-Geos and the Italian space agency ASI, the Kamil region was analysed using satellite data and in particular high-resolution radar images provided by the ASI-operated COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation.

Expedition to the Egyptian desert

The two-week, 40-person expedition included Egyptian and Italian scientists, as well as numerous local support workers, and was conducted as part of the 2009 Italian-Egyptian Year of Science and Technology (EISY). It was also supported with funding by ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme.

Three-day drive to reach Kamil crater

After a tiring, GPS-guided, three-day drive across the desert in 40°C heat, the team reached the crater.

They collected over 1000 kg of metallic meteorite fragments, including one 83-kg chunk thought to have split from the main meteorite body shortly before impact (it was found 200 m away from the crater). The joint team also conducted a thorough geological and topographical survey, using ground-penetrating radar to create a 3D digital terrain model. Geomagnetic and seismic surveys were also carried out.

Ground truth for small-scale impact craters

The researchers were stunned to find that Kamil crater, named after a nearby rocky outcrop, remains pristine, and must have been created relatively recently.

"This demonstrates that metallic meteorites having a mass on the order of 10 tonnes do not break up in the atmosphere, and instead explode when they reach the ground and produce a crater," says ESA's Dr Detlef Koschny, Head of Near Earth Objects segment for the SSA programme.

Kamil crater has become the target of intense interest for geologists, astrophysicists and even archaeologists.

"We are still determining the geochronology of the impact site, but the crater is certainly less than ten thousand years old -- and potentially less than a few thousand. The impact may even have been observed by humans, and archaeological investigations at nearby ancient settlements may help fix the date," says Dr Folco.

The data gathered during the expedition will be very useful to ESA's SSA activities for risk assessment of small asteroids with orbits that approach Earth, a category to which the Kamil impactor originally belonged.

Scientists say an apparent fragment from a meteor that lit up Midwestern skies this week has been recovered in southwestern Wisconsin.

The fragment weighs 0.3 pounds and is about the size of an unshelled peanut. The meteor had streaked across the sky about 10 pm Wednesday and was visible from southern Wisconsin and northern Iowa to central Missouri.

University of Wisconsin geology professor John Valley says fragment has a so-called fusion crust. The paper-thin blackened coating results when a meteor superheats as it speeds through the atmosphere.

Valley says the man who found the fragment lent it to university scientists for a two-hour analysis.

Based on preliminary tests, the meteor appears to have come from the vast asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

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  Fossil Found May Be Rare Dinosaur

DiscoveryOnline  April 12, 2010

Mountain Range H.S. Science Teacher May Have Found 'Ankylosaurid' Skull.

A Mountain Range High School science teacher with a hobby for paleontology has discovered what federal authorities said could be the first skull fragment from a rare dinosaur.

Kent Hups, a teacher at Westminster's Mountain Range High School, discovered the fossil in the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area in western Colorado.

Tests are pending, but the Bureau of Land Management said Saturday that the fragment appears to be the first from an armadillo-like dinosaur called the Ankylosaurid. The bone fragment is embedded in a rock weighing more than 100 pounds.

"It took 10 hours to get it out with a rock saw," Hups said. "It was exhausting work."

 Hups digs for dinosaur fossils under a BLM paleontological use permit. The teacher has findings displayed in two Colorado science museums. In 2008, Hups found a perfectly preserved footprint of an Ankylosaurid.

 "As the crow flies, this (skull) was about 1 1/2 miles from we found the print,"Hups said.

 Hups said if the skull fragment is confirmed as an Ankylosaurid, it would be the first fossil of its kind from that dinosaur. However Hups is tentative to claim anything yet. He said it could take a year or longer before the specimen is properly identified.

 The fossil will be brought to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for analysis.

 "We knew what kind of dinosaur it is based upon of the material we’ve pulled out before," Hups said. "We've got stuff that people have never seen before. We have stuff that is articulated, meaning it is how it was found in life.

 "It is definitely something very unique and very different."

 Fossil hunting brings many to western Colorado, and Grand Junction tourism officials are hoping the find sparks new interest in bone hunting.

  
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Ancient Thick-shelled Turtle Discovered in Coal Mine

DiscoveryOnline April 10, 2010

 A new fossil turtle species discovered in South America boasts quite a bulky shell - about as thick as your average high-school textbook.

The shell, about 3.3 feet (1 meter) across and 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) thick, might have protected the turtle against attacks from large crocodile-like animals as well as the giant Titanoboa, the world's largest snake (about 45-feet long), which would have shared this turtle's neighborhood around 60 million years ago, the researchers say.

The newly identified species, called Cerrejonemys wayuunaiki and discovered in the Cerrejón coal mine in Columbia, was the ancestor to one of the most diverse groups of South American freshwater turtles living today, said study author Edwin Cadena, a doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University.

 Its shell is about twice as thick as the shells of these modern freshwater turtles, he said.

The fossil provides a glimpse into what these creatures looked like all those years ago, which, besides their size, is surprisingly analogous to today's turtles, Cadena said. This similarity suggests these turtles were already pretty varied, even back then.

"The modern diversity that we see in the tropics of South America, it was already set up during the Paleocene," Cadena told LiveScience. The Paleocene is the period of time right after the extinction of the dinosaurs, from about 65 million to 56 million years ago.

The fossil is closely related to a group of turtles that have been found in Brazil, suggesting these turtles might have migrated up the coast of South America, Cadena said.

And the findings back up previous ideas about where this group of turtles originated.

"We are still trying to understand why six of this turtle's modern relatives live in the Amazon, Orinoco and Magdalena river basins of South America and one lives in Madagascar," Cadena said. "It closes an important gap in the fossil record and supports the idea that the group originated near the tip of South America before the continent separated from India and Madagascar more than 90 million years ago."

Cadena and his colleagues are currently working to characterize at least three more fossil turtle species, which are closely related to C. wayuunaiki, all from the Cerrejón mine site. Some of these species are even larger than this thick-shelled turtle, reaching almost 6 feet (170 cm) in length, Cadena said.

These findings, along with other fossils that have been discovered at Cerrejón (like Titanoboa), paint a picture of what life was like in the Amazon back then.

"[These fossils] tell us that after the extinction of dinosaurs, the tropics were rich in diversity, [they had] a really high diversity of reptiles," Cadena said. "Not only diversity of reptiles, but also really big reptiles, like the big snake that has been described already, the huge crocodiles, and in this case, huge turtles too."

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 U.S. Sitting on Mother Lode of Rare Tech-Crucial Minerals 
Jeremy Hsu TechNewsDaily livescience.com – Tue Mar 9, 12:00 pm ET 

China supplies most of the rare earth minerals found in technologies such as hybrid cars, wind turbines, computer hard drives and cell phones, but the U.S. has its own largely untapped reserves that could safeguard future tech innovation.  Those reserves include deposits of both "light" and "heavy" rare earths - families of minerals that help make everything from TV displays to magnets in hybrid electric motors. A company called U.S. Rare Earths holds the only known U.S. deposit of heavy rare earths with a concentration worth mining, according to a recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).  Light rare earths include the minerals ranging from lanthanum to gadolinium on the periodic table of elements, while heavy rare earths range from terbium to lutetium.

Averting disaster

If developed, such deposits could help the U.S. avoid a possibly crippling rare earth shortage in the next decade. China has warned that its own industrial demands could compel it to stop exporting rare earths within the next five or 10 years.  "There is already a shortage, because there are companies that already can't get enough material," said Jim Hedrick, a former USGS rare earth specialist who recently retired. "No one's trying to expand their use of rare earths because they know there's not more available."  U.S. Rare Earths practically stumbled upon its first rare earth deposit at Lehmi Pass, on the border between Idaho and Montana, about 15 years ago. The company founders coveted the area's reserves of thorium - an alternative nuclear fuel - and took little interest in the rare earths that were only used, at the time, in lighter flints and tracer bullets for the military.  Their view changed over the years as rare earths became practically irreplaceable in high-tech products used by millions of people today. The company only recently changed its name to U.S. Rare Earths after staking out another deposit at Diamond Creek, Idaho.  "The fact is, the Diamond Creek property is today, the most accessible, undeveloped rare earth resource with significant [heavy rare earths] that there is in North America," said Jack Lifton, an independent consultant who works with U.S. Rare Earths.  Recent USGS figures estimate that the U.S. holds rare earth ore reserves of up to 13 million metric tons. By contrast, the entire world produced just 124,000 metric tons in 2009 - but it would take both time and money for the U.S. to become self-sufficient in producing rare earths.

Deposits near civilization

The Diamond Creek location has the added advantages of being in mining-friendly Idaho and having access to nearby highways and power lines - factors that would make opening a mine much easier.  "We have power, light and roads, so we're not in the middle of the wilderness," said Ed Cowle, CEO of U.S. Rare Earths.  Cowle hopes to attract enough funding over the next six months to do some exploratory drilling at his company's deposits. He also pointed to growing interest from national legislators in prodding the federal government to take action.  "Many times opening a mine takes a certain period of time, but if there's a strategic need for material from government, that time period can be lessened," Cowle told TechNewsDaily. "We're hopeful of that because of the nature of what's in the ground."

An expensive proposition

Another company, Molycorp Minerals, has already begun processing "light" rare earths, such as lanthanum and neodymium, from a stockpile it accumulated at its mine in Mountain Pass, California. But it still has to ship its rare earths to China for final processing, because only China currently has the equipment needed for the job.  "No one [in the U.S.] wants to be first to jump into the market because of the cost of building a separation plant," Hedrick explained. The former USGS specialist said that such a plant requires thousands of stainless steel tanks holding different chemical solutions to separate out all the individual rare earths.  The upfront costs seem daunting. Hedrick estimated that opening just one mine and building a new separation plant might cost anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion and would require a minimum of eight years.  Lifton has also suggested that many U.S. companies have not jumped into the market because China's state-owned mines keep rare earth prices artificially low. But if U.S. companies do not begin mining American rare earth deposits soon, they may be left scrambling if China does one day stop exporting rare earths.  But Cowle, the CEO of U.S. Rare Earths, seems hopeful that momentum has already begun building for the U.S. government to encourage development of its own rare earth deposits.  "From what I see, security of supply is going to be more important than the prices," Cowle said.

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  Gamburtsev Mountain Range Confirmed Beneath Antarctic Ice

From: www.geology.com Feb. 1, 2010

Revealing a Buried Mountain Range

Flying twin-engine light aircraft the equivalent of several trips around the globe and establishing a network of seismic instruments across an area the size of Texas, a U.S.-led, international team of scientists has not only verified the existence of a mountain range that is suspected to have caused the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet to form, but also has created a detailed picture of the rugged landscape buried under more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice.

The Last Unexplored Mountain Range on Earth

"Working cooperatively in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, all the while working in temperatures that averaged -30 degrees Celsius, our seven-nation team has produced detailed images of last unexplored mountain range on Earth," said Michael Studinger, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the co-leader of the U.S. portion of the Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province (AGAP) project. "As our two survey aircraft flew over the flat white ice sheet, the instrumentation revealed a remarkably rugged terrain with deeply etched valleys and very steep mountain peaks."  The National Science Foundation (NSF), in its role as manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program, provided much of the complex logistical support that made the discoveries possible. NSF also supported U.S. researchers from Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, Pennsylvania State University, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Incorporated Research Institutions in Seismology (IRIS).

Role of the Mountains in Ice Sheet Formation

The initial AGAP findings--which are based on both the aerogeophysical surveys and on data from a network of seismic sensors deployed as part of the project--while extremely exciting, also raise additional questions about the role of the Gamburtsevs in birthing the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which extends over more than 10 million square kilometers atop the bedrock of Antarctica, said geophysicist Fausto Ferraccioli, of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who led the U.K. science team.

Similarities with the European Alps

"We now know that not only are the mountains the size of the European Alps but they also have similar peaks and valleys," he said. "But this adds even more mystery about how the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet formed."  He added that "if the ice sheet grew slowly then we would expect to see the mountains eroded into a plateau shape. But the presence of peaks and valleys could suggest that the ice sheet formed quickly--we just don't know. Our big challenge now is to dive into the data to get a better understanding of what happened" millions of years ago.  The AGAP survey area covered roughly 2 million square kilometers of the ice sheet.

The initial data also appear to confirm earlier findings that a vast aquatic system of lakes and rivers exists beneath the ice sheet of Antarctica, a continent that is the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined.  "The temperatures at our camps hovered around -30 degrees Celsius, but three kilometers beneath us at the bottom of the ice sheet we saw liquid water in the valleys," said AGAP U.S. Co-leader Robin Bell, also of Lamont Doherty. "The radar mounted on the wings of the aircraft transmitted energy through the thick ice and let us know that it was much warmer at the base of the ice sheet."  The AGAP data will help scientists to determine the origin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Gamburtsevs' role in it. It will also help them to understand the role the subglacial aquatic system plays in the dynamics of ice sheets, which will, in turn, help reduce scientific uncertainties in predictions of potential future sea level rise. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that it is difficult to predict how much the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea-level rise because so little is known about the behavior of the ice sheets.  The data also will be used to help locate where the world's oldest ice is located.

International Polar Year

The AGAP discoveries were made through fieldwork that took place in December and January, near the official conclusion of the International Polar Year (IPY), the largest coordinated international scientific effort in five decades. Ceremonies marking the conclusion of IPY fieldwork will take place in Geneva, Switzerland on Feb. 25.  NSF is the lead U.S. agency for IPY. Through the Antarctic Program, NSF manages all federally funded research on the southernmost continent.  Fully in the spirit of IPY, noted Detlef Damaske of Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, teams of scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. pooled their knowledge, expertise and logistical resources to deploy two survey aircraft, equipped with ice-penetrating radar, gravimeters and magnetic sensors as well as the network of seismometers, an effort that no one nation alone could have mounted.  "This is a fantastic finale to IPY," added Ferraccioli.  Bell meanwhile, noted that AGAP is "emblematic of what the international science community can accomplish when working together."  In one of the most ambitious, challenging and adventurous 'deep field' Antarctic IPY expeditions, AGAP scientists gathered the terabytes of data needed to create images of the enigmatic Gamburtsevs, first discovered by Russian scientists in 1957 during the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the predecessor to IPY.

An Enormous Data Collection Effort

While the planes made a series of survey flights, covering a total of 120,000 square kilometers, the seismologists flew to 26 different sites throughout an area larger than the state of Texas using Twin Otter aircraft equipped with skis, to install scientific equipment that will run for the next year on solar power and batteries.  The seismology team, from Washington University, Penn State, IRIS, and Japan's National Institute of Polar Research, also recovered ten seismographs that have been collecting data since last year over the dark Antarctic winter at temperatures as low as -73 degrees Celsius (-100 degrees Fahrenheit).  "The season was a great success," said Douglas Wiens, of Washington University in St. Louis. "We recovered the first seismic recordings from this entire part of Antarctica, and operated seismographs over the Antarctic winter at temperatures as low as -100 F for the first time. Now, we are poring over the data to find out what is responsible for pushing up mountains in this part of Antarctica."