Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Unrecorded Meteorite Crater Found On Mount Ararat?

The discovery of an unrecorded crater raises the possibility that the biblical mountain was struck by a meteorite, say physicists

Mount Ararat is an ancient, isolated volcano in eastern Turkey near the borders with Iran and Armenia. According to the Bible, the mountain is the final resting place of Noah’s Ark. Many an expedition has tried and failed to find the Ark’s remains.

The northern and western slopes of the mountain are closed to public so how two physicists gained access is anybody’s guess. However, today Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and Sverre Aarseth from the University of Cambridge in the UK, publish an account of a remarkable discovery they made while walking in the region.

At an altitude of 2100 metre, at coordinates 39˚ 47’ 30”N, 44˚ 14’ 40”E, they found a well-preserved and previously unrecorded crater some 70 metres across. (Google Earth is of little use. The resolution of the imagery at this location is poor.) That’s a decent size for a crater that has gone unnoticed for so long (although new craters of this kind of size do turn up from time to time.)

The question of course is how this crater was formed. One possibility is that the crater is volcanic. But Gurzadyan and Aarseth raise another: that it is the result of a meteorite impact. They rule out a glacial origin on the grounds that 2100 metres is well below the glacier line.

Gurzadyan and Aarseth publish their account with the intention of attracting interest so that the crater can be properly classified.

New craters are important because they help determine how heavily the Earth has been bombarded in the past. And while small craters are far more numerous than big ones on other bodies in the Solar System, the opposite is true on Earth because small ones tend to be eroded away more quickly.

Interestingly, the crater wasn’t their only discovery during their trip. Because the region is closed, it is virtually unexplored. Gurzadyan and Aarseth say they also stumbled across the remains of a 5th or 6th century Armenian basilica that is unknown to experts.

Sounds like an adventure in the making for anybody with the time and inclination to go. (And with the necessary permits, of course.)

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.3715: A Meteorite Crater On Mt. Ararat?

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.