I guess you could say that as far as craters are concerned, Vredefort is the “Big Man on Campus”.
Vredefort crater is the oldest and largest verified impact remnant on the planet, located in South Africa about 100km from Johannesburg. To the untrained eye it may not appear at first blush to be a crater, more of an interesting collection of hills.
It’s believed that about 2 Billion years ago a 10km wide asteroid impacted this site that left us with a crater that has a diameter of roughly 300km (186 mi). The impact struck with so much force that first the ground heaved, then melted granite, the granite flowed and solidified.
Another somewhat unique feature about this particular site is that it’s one of the few multi-ringed craters on planet, this feature is normally seen elsewhere in the solar system like the Moon for instance.
You can view this for yourself on GOOG’s map.
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These low-angle impacts would also have significant effect on the rotation of the Earth on it’s axis. Maybe that’s why we have frozen mammoths in arctic ice, edible to some degree because the freeze happed so instantaneously.
Obviosly Gaia responds by establishing a new spin quite quickly, because her core is molten metal, and that, my friends, is bigger than most objects hitting the skin.
Interesting insight Dave. Do you know of any other sites discussing this concept? Thanks!