Month: July 2008

The Sichuan earthquake

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Beneath the Dragon’s Gate (Longmenshan) Mountains of Sichuan Province, China an apparently ‘stuck’ segment of a major fault complex failed on 12 May 2008 (Stone, R. 2008. An unpredictably violent fault. Science, v. 320, p. 1578-1580). Unprecedented access to the world’s media resulted in our exposure to the full horror of the results of major seismic events in mountainous terrain and on habitations, especially schools, whose building standards were unable to withstand ground shaking. &0 thousand souls died, thousands more are still unaccounted for and more than 1.5 million people have become refugees in a country that is rapidly emerging from Third World status. Now that aftershocks have subsided massive threats remain from the many landslide-blocked rivers and fractured dams. Yet we also witnessed enormous mobilisation of the People’s Army within hours of the earthquake and truly heroic attempts to rescue as many trapped people as possible. Without that swift response the casualties would undoubtedly have been worse.

China boasts one of the most sophisticated seismic warning systems outside of California and Japan, deploying robotic seismometers and GPS recorders in the most risky regions, and with a 10-thousand strong Earthquake Administration. Sadly, Chinese seismologists regarded the faults shown to be accumulating displacement most quickly as those most likely to fail. It is generally ‘stuck’ segments that fail catastrophically. China has a long-respected reputation for gathering data generally regarded as ‘non-scientific’, such as well water levels, and animal behaviour, that might give empirical clues to impending earthquakes. The Tangshan earthquake of 28 July 1976, which killed a quarter of a million people 160 km from Beijing, was preceded by reports of shifts in the water table, odd ‘earthlights’ and unusual animal behaviour. Paying serious attention to reports by ordinary people of such oddities is reported to have avoided untold numbers of deaths in the period since Tangshan, but not in the case of Sichuan. Strangely, a Taiwanese weather satellite detected decreased electrical activity in the ionosphere above Sichuan hours before the recent earthquake (see Clouds and large earthquakes in May 2008 issue of EPN). Geophysicists have noted increased emissions of radon in the period immediately preceding some major earthquakes which might conceivably have an effect on the ionosphere. Whatever, prediction of catastrophic earthquakes has had very few successes in terms of lives saved, and the signal lesson from Sichuan, as from that which destroyed the Japanese city of Kobe in 1995, is that building standards in zones of active faulting must take account of the risk of ground movement.

See also: Stone, R. 2008. Landslide, flooding pose threats as experts survey quake’s impact. Science, v. 320, p. 996-997.

Extraterrestrial impactors

July 2008

June 30, 2008 was the centenary of the mysterious Tunguska event that devastated more than 2000 km2 of forest 1000 km north of Lake Baikal in Siberia at 7 am a hundred years before. Much of the mystery stems from there being no sign of a crater and therefore of the process involved. Speculation about the cause of a massive explosion between 5-10 km above the surface still goes on (Steel, D, 2008. Tunguska at 100. Nature, v. 453, p. 1157-1159). Ideas have ranged over a gamut of high-energy physical processes involved in the explosion: a deuterium-rich, fluffy comet that was ignited as a thermonuclear explosion by hypersonic atmospheric entry; a lump of antimatter; a miniature black hole; explosive release and ignition of natural gas; a ‘Verneshot’, and even an alien space craft involved in an accident. The chances are that the explosion was more mundane, and akin to what occurs inside a diesel engine. Compressive heating of the air in front of a small asteroid or comet travelling at more than 15 km s-1 would generate temperatures around 50 thousand degrees. Flash vaporisation of a small comet or asteroid would add to a massive shock wave at the epicentre, rather than by an intact projectile. It is thought that many small craters, such as Meteor Crater in Arizona, result from impacts by strong metallic asteroids, whereas stony ones or comets easily disintegrate. Whatever, research still goes on at the site, now completely reforested.

The centenary spurred Nature to devote pages 1157-1175 in its 26 June 2008 issue to impact-induced features from Earth and other planets, together with three Letters and two reviews. Topics covered include the search for near-Earth objects and the Spaceguard survey, which is beginning to suggest that humanity can concentrate on global warming for the next century or so, and truly monster impact structures from the Moon and Mars, including evidence for one that may have ‘scalped’ northern Mars. In one of the reviews it is said that a sci-fi novel (Niven, R. & Pournelle, J. 1977. Lucifer’s Hammer. Harper Collins) inspired the Alvarez father-and-son team that first postulated an impact origin for the K-T mass extinction event. The second review is of a highly realistic sculptural depiction of a pope (John Paul II) knocked over by a meteorite: perhaps planetary science’s first involvement, literally, in what some might consider lèse majesté. So, in many ways, quite an event…

See also: Cohen, D. 2008. The day the sky exploded. New Scientist, v. 198, 28 June 2008 issue, p. 38-41.

Entire Landsat archive now accessible by all, free of cost

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May 2008 saw probably the most significant announcement for geologists of this century (The Landsat Science Team 2008. Free access to Landsat imagery. Science, v.  320, p. 1011; and see landsat.usgs.gov/images/squares/USGS_Landsat_Imagery_Release.pdf). Given a broadband internet connection, it will soon be possible to download Landsat data (MSS, TM and ETM+) covering any area on Earth free of charge from the US Geological Survey, provided it occurs among the >2 million scenes archived by their EROS Data Center. This act of open-handed generosity by the USGS marks a key step in revolutionising the activities of geologists of the Third World, especially those in Africa; the least well-mapped continent. Landsat data and those from the Japanese-US ASTER instrument aboard the Terra satellite offer huge potential for mapping rocks and soils, especially in dry lands, at scales of up to 1:50 000. Africans need to know about their physical resources, especially water, instead of well-heeled mining, petroleum and consulting companies from rich countries, who have more or less monopolised (and sometimes eked out) knowledge of the continent’s riches. Now they can begin to find out for themselves.

Satnavs useful to hydrogeologists as well as white-van drivers

Microwave radiation emitted by radar remote sensing systems does not merely produce useful images of the Earth when all else fails because of cloud cover. They interact with the surface in such a way that their characteristics change, specifically when the moisture content of surface materials such as soil varies. This phenomenon has spurred development of satellite-borne estimation of soil moisture. But since the launch of constellations of satellites aimed at precise navigation, such as the well-known US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Europe’s Galileo system, everywhere on the Earth is continually bathed in weak microwaves. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder have done a test of the concept using a single GPS receiver recording continuously at one site in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (Larson, K.M. et al. 2008. Using GPS multipath to measure soil moisture fluctuations: initial results. GPS Solutions, v. 12, p. 173-177).

Multipath signals are received when an electromagnetic signal arrives at an antenna, not along a direct path from its source, but indirectly due to reflection of the signal by an object or surface near the antenna. Multipath contaminates all GPS measurements, leading to small positional errors, because the receiver locks onto a signal that mixes the direct and reflected signal. It is difficult to isolate the effects of multipath in GPS carrier phase signals. However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) data computed by a GPS receiver are also affected by multipath and provide an easier route to quantifying multipath effects.  In fact the authors found that the amplitude of the SNR varies over time and correlates well with variations in local soil moisture following rainy and dry episodes. Although a first test of concept, the results are sufficiently encouraging that specialist GPS receivers may be developed that allow both precise positioning and accurate measurements of soil moisture – what may become a must for hydrogeologists, especially in arid and semi-arid terrains.

Dietary negation

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The hominin genus Paranthropus rarely hits the front page by comparison with the related australopithecines, despite their having had jaw and cheek bones that would put Sandy Shaw and a variety of 60s catwalkers to shame. (It is only polite to observe that there the vague similarity ends, for paranthropoids have a bizarre skull crest for attachment of jaw muscles and brow ridges that were probably better than a baseball cap at preventing glare.) The first (P. boisei) to be unearthed at Olduvai, Tanzania in 1959, was dubbed ‘Nutcracker Man’ by its finder Philip Tobias. Despite having formidable chewing tackle to drive its massive flat, thickly enameled cheek teeth, wear on their surfaces is little different from that on the teeth of ‘gracile’ australopithecines. (Ungar, P.S. et al. 2008. Dental Microwear and Diet of the Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Paranthropus boisei. PLoS ONE, v. 3, on-line e2044 (www.plosone.org) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002044). They show no sign of the microscopic pitting that characterises teeth of living primates that eat hard, brittle foods, such as nuts or woody stems.  Similar studies of the teeth of P. robustus show insufficient wear to suggest an habitual diet of that kind, although it may have eaten such foods when others were in short supply. Chances are that huge jaws and big teeth evolved to give paranthropoids a wider choice of diet and hence greater fitness in a climatically fluctuating terrain. It seems they chose to eat soft foods when available, as do gorillas today. In any event, they were remarkably successful creatures, and the two species cohabited the East African savannah with several human species, including H. erectus, for around a million years from 2.2 Ma when they appeared. Carbon-isotope data obtained from 20 paranthropoid and 25 australopithecine teeth by other researchers reveal a broad but similar diet for both, i.e. a mix of grasses and fruits, suggesting both had eating habits that could shift from apes to those of baboons. However, such C-isotope data cannot distinguish between exclusive vegetarianism and eating the flesh of herbivores. Low dental wear is also associated with meat eating…

See also: Gibbons, A. 2008. Australopithecus not much of a nutcracker. Science, v.  320, p. 608-609; part of a report on the April 2008 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists

Stress and the Cambrian Explosion

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The opening of the Phanerozoic Eon at the base of the Cambrian is, as everyone knows, characterised by the appearance of body fossils of organisms that were preserved because they had calcium-rich hard parts. Thereafter biological diversity grew and grew, despite episodic sets back. Why calcium carbonate and phosphate skeletal parts evolved is still a mystery, although it may have had something to do with an increase in the calcium-ion concentration of seawater. Earth had not long emerged from the last of several truly deep freezes, associated with evidence for which are carbon isotope signals that may indicate repeated mass extinctions of life forms that left few tangible traces. Whatever the truth, it must have lain in some major change in global environmental conditions. Evidence for one such widespread chemical stress has emerged from black shales at the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary in the Oman and China (Wille, M. et al. 2008. Hydrogen sulphide release to surface waters at the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary. Nature, v. 453, p. 767-769).

Molybdenum, like many transition metals, has several valence states, some soluble in oxidising conditions, others when conditions are reducing. Solution or precipitation when redox conditions change may cause fractionation among stable isotopes, and isotopes of Mo are a case in point. The Swiss-German-US team found that close to the base of the Cambrian the 98Mo/95Mo ratio underwent rapid changes in black shales of Oman and China. They ascribe this to a major upwelling of hydrogen sulfide-rich deep seawater, indeed it would be difficult to suggest any other mechanism that could have caused the shift. Molybdenum is soluble in oxidising waters, and the increase in Mo concentrations in the shales at the time of the isotopic anomaly must mark a shift to reducing conditions in 542 Ma surface seas, hence the link to such an upwelling. Such rises in highly toxic ‘sour gas’-rich water have been suggested as a possible cause for the mass extinctions at the ends of the Permian and Triassic (see Global warming, sour gas and mass extinctions in the January 2007 issue of EPN).

The globally abundant Ediacaran fauna of soft, bag-like and quilted organisms that lived in the late Neoproterozoic has no counterpart in the Cambrian record, even in lagerstätten. Moreover, the Cambrian shelly fauna does not simply spring into place fully formed: it developed over a protracted period and did not simply succeed or evolve from the Ediacaran. It looks like there was the last of a succession of Neoproterozoic mass extinctions at the outset of the Phanerozoic. Indeed the Mo anomalies coincide with abnormally ‘light’ carbon isotopes in the black shales, due the accumulation of massive amounts of dead organisms, and formation of large phosphatic deposits globally.

Yet another blow for creationism

The Devonian transition from fish to four-legged animals is represent by one of the best time sequences showing the development of physical features from one use to another, in their case from fins to legs. Lobe-finned fishes and the earliest amphibians show this nicely, with the missing link of Tiktaalik found in 2006 (see A fish-quadruped missing link in EPN for June 2006) seeming to gild the lily. Now, yet another member of the sequence neatly connects the limb form and function of lobe-fins to the peculiar Tiktaalik (Ahlberg, P.E. et al. 2008. Ventastega curonica and the origin of tetrapod morphology. Nature, v. 453, p. 1199-1204). But perhaps the ID school will consider it a case of the designer continually changing his or her objective.

What, pray, is the platypus?

In a mood of solemn gaiety the world greeted the publication in May 2008 of the the duck-billed platypus or Ornithorhynchus anatinus genome (Warren, W.C. and a very large number of other authors 2008. Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution. Nature, v. 453, p. 175-183). My reaction to the title of the paper was, ‘So it blooming well should’. The eponymous platypus has few rivals for oddness: it has a beak for a start; detects its prey using electrosounding; has venom-injecting spurs; females lay eggs but suckle little platypuses, despite having no nipples (the milk is exuded by belly skin when sucked); has fur like an otter; no teeth and the male ejaculates sperm that hunt in packs. It lives in Australia and has kindly eyes. The vast authorship needed considerable space to fully document this strange package of characteristics, leaving little room to expand on the novelty of its genome. In a nutshell, the platypus combines features both reptilian and mammalian: no surprise there. But it is dissimilar from ducks.

Vivipary in armoured fishes

The extinct placoderms  were formidable predators of Silurian to Devonian seas and brackish waterways; in fact they were the vertebrates of those Periods. Being covered by articulated platy armour, their heads are well represented in the fossil record, but their aft parts are not, having been naked of protection. They were anatomically advanced creatures, but succumbed to the late-Devonian mass extinction, unlike other fishes, including those that figure in the ancestry of all terrestrial vertebrates. Placoderms provide the first example of the evolution of live birthing, not to recur until the evolution of the higher mammals in the last 100 Ma. Evidence for placoderm vivipary comes from an astonishing Australian fossil that contain embryos a few centimetres long (Long, J.A. et al. 2008, Live birth in the Devonian period. Nature, v. 453, p. 650-652).

A volcanic nursery for life

Aside from Darwin’s ‘warm, little pond’, all sorts of environments have been suggested for the origin and early nurturing of life. One possibility is in the nutrient-rich cavities between pillows in ocean-floor lavas. The evocative black smokers marking hydrothermal springs on the ocean floor have long been known to host abundant live, from the microbial to the large. Yet the entire volcanic pat of the oceanic lithosphere interacts with water to source hydrothermal vents. The hydration and oxidising reactions that take place in basalts are exothermic, and so yield plenty of energy, both thermal and chemical. This retrogression has offered potential for biological chemautotrophy since mantle-derived magmas first met liquid water; arguably since 4.5 Ga ago. A study of organic infestation of glassy pillowed basalts reveals that today there are up to ten thousand times more prokaryotic cells in exposed seafloor basalts than there are in the overlying seawater (Santelli, C. M. and 7 others 2008. Abundance and diversity of microbial life in ocean crust. Nature, v.  453, p. 653-656). The study relied on RNA sequencing of organic material in the glasses, rather than microscopic examination.

Using thin sections and high-powered microscopes shows up tell-tale signs of the effects of colonisation of surfaces on fractures in oceanic basalt, backed up evidence for the cells themselves. The effects are distinctive and potentially offer a means of judging microbial colonisation of ancient crust, especially that of early Archaean age.

A 0.8 Ma history of changing greenhouse gases

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Polar ice cores have presented us with the most exquisite records of how high-latitude climate has changed in the recent past from indirect clues presented by variations in stable isotopes of oxygen and deuterium (temperature change), dust and sulfate content (aridity and volcanicity respectively) in layers of ice. That proxy record extends back to 800 ka in the Dome C core from Antarctica, showing in great detail the course of the last nine glacial-interglacial cycles, both the astronomical effect of a changeover from a 40 ka pacing to one of around 100 ka and many intricacies on a millennial time scale. The most tangible archive of information resides in the air bubbles trapped by the original snow that eventually turned into ice. That reveals how the intricate pacing of climate change has been almost perfectly tracked by the global carbon cycle as shown by changes in the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This was first demonstrated by cores through the Greenland ice cap, which penetrate just the last glacial episode and the warmth before and after.

After several years of painstaking bubble analyses at many collaborating labs, the full 800 ka greenhouse-gas records from Antarctica have now appeared (Luthi, D. and 10 others 2008. High resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present. Nature, v.  453, p. 379-382. Lulergue, L. and 9 others 2008. Orbital and millennial-scale features of atmospheric CH4 over the past 800,000 years. Nature, v.  453, p. 383-386). These long records demonstrate the close connection between climate and greenhouse gases that must be maintained by complex (and not fully understood) feedback mechanisms. Different Earth processes affect the two principal gases, methane probably being controlled by effects of varying temperature and rainfall on peat-rich swamps in the tropics, whereas carbon dioxide’s main driver is capture and release of carbon by the oceans. The central feature remains that of astronomical forces, with perhaps some sign of a signal from the 413 ka component of orbital eccentricity from a shift in the range of temperatures and greenhouse gases in 100 ka cycles around 450 ka ago, and a broad change in methane concentrations. Yet, despite being a pole away from high northern latitudes where comparison of the Greenland ice record with North Atlantic sea-floor sediment data revealed a northern cause for dramatic short term shifts, much the same millennial cycles characterise the whole Antarctic record. It could be that these rapid changes are proxies for the course of northern climate vagaries – there are about 75 of them in the methane Antarctic record. So stunning are the new data that they are sure to spur attempts to go back even further by more drilling in Antarctica, probably in the eastern ice cap where current air temperature and snow fall are extremely low and a greater length of time may be preserved in a smaller thickness of ice. That is because the faster snow and ice accumulate the more rapidly flow removes the record: the reason why the thick Greenland ice, although capable of yielding time resolution of as little as individual years, cannot retain records much beyond 200 ka.

See also: Brook, E. 2008. Windows on the greenhouse. Nature, v.  453, p. 291-292.

 

The yellowing of the Sahara

As Earth emerged steadily from the last glacial maximum, around 14.8 ka when temperatures were close to those of the Holocene yet sea level still had a way to rise before reaching its current level, the Sahara became a land of wetlands, lakes and grassland. Many caves within its modern arid confines contain superb artwork depicting its fauna and the forager-hunters that preyed on it. Around the time of the earliest Pharaonic civilisation on the Nile floodplain (~3000 BCE) the humid episode ended, forcing inhabitants of the Sahara either to the Nile valley of the Mediterranean coast. Having spanned the millennium-long climatic upheaval of the Younger Dryas and the relative stability and warmth of the early Holocene, why it ended is something of a mystery. A small, amazingly beautiful lake in northern Chad seems to hold the key, as it has existed and gathered sediment for at least 6 thousand years (Kröpelin, S and 14 others 2008. Climate-driven ecosystem succession in the Sahara: the past 6000 years. Science, v. 320, p. 765-768), Lake Yoa is one of several permanent lakes fed by ancient groundwater from the vast Nubian Sandstone aquifer, yet receives negligible rainfall. The uppermost lake sediments are laminated in an annual fashion so that each layer and its contents of aquatic organisms, pollen and dust can be precisely dated.

Between 4200 and 3900 years ago the lake changed from a freshwater habitat to a salt lake when evaporation overcame recharge by rain. However, the environment as a whole did not change suddenly, but progressively. The sudden change in salinity resulted from Lake Yoa losing any outflow, which previously had removed salts accumulated by evaporation of the inflowing groundwater. The lake would then no longer have had any use for humans and their livestock, but conditions did not drive people out of the Sahara suddenly.

Complexities of the deep mantle

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The use of seismic signals from many receiving stations to probe physical properties of the Earth tomographically is producing increasingly sharp results from the deep mantle. In a fascinating review of the state of that art, combined with results of high-pressure experiments that throw light on deep mantle changes in mineralogy and density, Edward Garnero and Allen McNamara of Arizona State University present some stunning graphics (Garnero, E.J. & McNamara, A.K. 2008. Structure and dynamics of Earth’s lower mantle. Science, v.  320, p. 626-627). Their scope is global, and dominated by thermochemical upwelling plumes and superplumes, zones towards which whole-mantle convection has swept dense material, and some indication of a connection between the two huge phenomena. It seems there are also pockets of magma close to the core-mantle boundary, which are hinted at by abnormally low shear-wave velocities.

Global wildfires at the K-T boundary debunked

Among the minuscule treasures of the K-T boundary deposits across the world are abundant amounts of what researchers have generally called soot. Interpreted literally, these seem to point to massive combustion of living vegetation at the time of the Chicxulub impact. That presupposes two things: that oxygen levels in the late Cretaceous were sufficiently high (~30%) to support combustion of green vegetation and heating from the entry flash of the Chicxulub projectile. The first is possible, but not the second, for not all the planet would have been bathed in the flash caused by compressive heating of the atmosphere ahead of the inbound planetesimal. Nonetheless, global forest fires were the accepted wisdom. A closer look at the ‘soots’ from eight K-T boundary exposures reveals that they are not made of charcoal, which vegetation burning would produce (Harvey, M.C. et al. 2008. Combustion of fossil organic matter at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-P) boundary. Geology, v. 36, p. 355-358). Instead the resemble carbonaceous nanospheres that result from incomplete combustion of pulverised coal or oil aerosols in power stations. By chance, the Chicxulub impact was next to what is now one of the most productive oilfields on Earth; the Canterell field in Mexico.

Astonishing stratigraphy of the north pole of Mars

Since, so far as we know, not a single sentient being has set foot on the Martian surface the title of this item might seem strange; but it is true. One of the features of microwave radiation is that it is capable of penetrating through solid surfaces and imaging the subsurface, given the right conditions. This phenomenon is best exploited by ice, and ground-penetrating radar is routinely used for sounding Earths glaciers and ice caps. To a lesser extent sedimentary layers can be penetrated, provided they are very dry. Radar is also an extremely useful remote-sensing tool with which to examine surfaces, and no planetary mission would be complete without some kind of radar instrument. The US Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carries a radar system targeted at just such penetration – the Shallow Radar or SHARAD.

SHARAD is operated along traverses and provides cross sections of the subsurface that look very like seismic sections, with structure picked out by reflecting surfaces. Crossing the north polar ice cap of Mars, SHARAD reveals a simple layered sequence (Phillips, R.J. and 26 others 2008. Mars north polar deposits: stratigraphy, age and geodynamical response. Science, v. 320, p. 1182-1185). Nonetheless the layering is interesting as it reveals what appear to be cyclical processes involved in the ice cap’s evolution; perhaps by ~million-year periodicity in Mars’s obliquity or orbital eccentricity. The radar transparency of the north polar region is probably down to almost pure ice, around 1 km thick. Therein lie clues to another Martian feature: its lithosphere is very strong and thick. That conclusion stems from the lack of any significant annular topographic bulge around  the ice cap. Kilometre thick ice on Earth would result in a measurable feature of that kind, due to displacement of the underlying asthenosphere. The post-glacial relaxation of such a bulge that once lay to the south of the British ice cap is responsible for the drowning of valleys in SW England especially, and measurable subsidence of southern Britain today.

See also: Kerr, R. 2008. Layers within layers hint at a wobbly Martian climate. Science, v. 320, p. 867.

Other Martian oddities

A wonderfully written and illustrated summary of some of the strange recent findings about Mars appeared in the 24 May 2008 issue of New Scientist (Clark, S. 2008. Fire & ice. New Scientist, v. 198 24 May 2008 issue, p. 35-39). It emphasises the role of water and the chaotic orbital and spin behaviour of the ‘Red Planet’ in shaping its surface. Clark draws a picture of mystery and weirdness that will surely appeal to all Mars buffs.

How to spot impact sites that others have missed

The Earth’s surface is not peppered with obvious impact craters, as are the surfaces of other planetary bodies, because our planet is active tectonically and in terms of weathering, erosion and sedimentary deposition. Craters here get ‘ironed-out’ or buried quickly. Yet there is no way that the Earth could have escaped the episodic rain of objects large and small that results from gravitational perturbation of asteroids and comets by the complex motions of the giant planets. Finding signs of past impacts adds to knowledge of their effects on life, for example, as well as on the processes that accompany ‘mountains that fall from the sky’: it is a damn sight cheaper than doing the field work on the Moon or Mars. Astonishingly, a large impact site straddling a major highway in New Mexico escaped detection until recently (Fackelman, S.P. et al. 2008. Shatter cone and microscopic shock-alteration evidence for a post-Paleoproterozoic terrestrial impact structure near Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 270, p. 290-299). The clue that something swift and terrible had occurred in New Mexico during the late Precambrian were strange structures in road cuttings that looked like cartoons of Christmas trees. They consist of multiple cone-shaped features nested together in masses up to 2 m long and 0.5 m across. Other processes can form these strange structures, but finds of shocked minerals and signs of melting in the rocks affected by the cones confirmed a suspicion of a nearby impact structure. Shatter cones can easily be overlooked by geologists who have never seen such features before. The fact that those in New Mexico occur in recent road cuttings helped the authors spot them. At known impact sites shatter cones occur exclusively within the zone of uplift at the centre of complex craters. Those in New Mexico occur over an area about 3 km across, suggesting a minimum size for the now vanished crater of 6-13 km across.