Showing posts with label Geoff Notkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geoff Notkin. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

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.