I made progress on my project for Dr. Smith today, which I have appropriately titled “Remarks on Terrestrial Craters and the Components of the Asteroid Belt”. I got a good ways into my introduction on Impact Craters, and I revisited a lot of the information that I learned in USAYPT this past year when we also had to investigate impact craters, so it was nice to be familiar with much of the material.
However, one interesting thing that I learned when writing the introduction was the there are apparently almost 170 known impact craters on Earth!
The operative word there is “known”, because impact craters can be millions of years old and erosion plays a big role is shaping the land over time. This means that there are likely many impact craters that existed on Earth a long time ago that we will never really know about because the evidence of their existence has been smoothed out over time. Imagine that!