| | (1) Contact: 15 million years ago an asteroid of about 1km diameter penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere and crashes onto the surface with a velocity of at least 20 km/s (72'000 km/h). Beneath the impacting asteroid air and rock get enormously compressed, heated and ejected laterally (jetting). The ejected rock material is at first liquid, but solidifies during the flight, which takes it as far as Bohemia, Czech Republic, about 450km away (glassy objects, called Moldavites, conserve streamlined shapes and are today found in southern Czech Republic). Within a few hundredths of a second the asteroid penetrates mesozoic sedimentary rocks and then intrudes the underlying cristalline basement rocks. | » |  |
