Cosmic MD'ing in TX

"I’m standing where blue sky meets the yellow sand of Texas desert and a chance encounter with the extraterrestrial changed forever the texture of this landscape.

Some 63,000 years ago, a school-bus-size mass of molten iron and nickel from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter plummeted to Earth here, leaving a hole 100 feet deep and 550 feet across. The explosion, three times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, spewed shrapnel for a mile and a half in every direction, punching four more small craters nearby.

I had never heard of the Texas town of Odessa until, flipping through cable channels one night, I came across “Meteorite Men” on the Discovery Science cable channel. Geoffrey Notkin and Steve Arnold, the stars, stood in a barren field while a tractor pulled a Rube Goldberg-assortment of pipes and wires -- a giant metal detector of sorts."

Read more HERE.