crater

If you’ve seen Shingeki no Kyojin (if you haven’t, I’m envious), the comparison with Shiganshina is inevitable: the image on the left of the montage on the cover corresponds to the Nördlingen market square and the one on the right is the city seen from above, completely fortified with a wall that surrounds it. However and although it is fan pilgrimage destination of the series, there is officially no relationship between the two. At first glance, the architecture of Nördlingen makes it just another fairytale Bavarian village, but this German city in the Donau-Ries district (in Swabia) is anything but just another one. In 1215, Emperor Frederick II promoted it to an imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and a century later they began to build the wall. The municipality is integrated within the crater that left a meteorite when it fell. However, we know this now: until the 1960s, geologists themselves thought that the depression was an inactive volcano. Nördlingen is in a crater. He Nördlinger Ries It is a depression 24 kilometers wide and up to 150 meters caused by the impact of a meteorite approximately one kilometer in diameter in the Miocene, which pierced a primary crater of 11 kilometers. As deepens the International Union of Geological Sciencesthat hole grew due to the uplift of the crater floor and marginal collapse, until it reached what it is now. The Ries asteroid impacted with a speed of at least 70,000 km/h, causing an explosion of heat and energy that lasted approximately 10 minutes: the shock wave traveled through the area, setting everything on fire up to 100 kilometers away, which ended life in that radius. Afterwards, a lake was formed where diverse flora and fauna settled. The findings in the nearby Ofnet caves They confirm that the site of today’s Nördlingen was already inhabited in the late Paleolithic. The wall outlines the diameter of the meteorite. When in 1327 Louis the Bavarian ordered build the wall of Nördlingen, no one knew that he was tracing the exact outline of the meteorite that had hit there 15 million years earlier, as notes NASA. The medieval historic center fits almost perfectly within the kilometer diameter of the primary crater: a geological coincidence that would not be discovered until the 20th century. With a perimeter of 2.7 kilometers, it is one of the three medieval walls of Germany preserved almost intact and the only one that can be visited in its entirety: five gates, twelve towers and two bastions make up this circuit that, seen from the top of the Daniel tower, reveals its perfectly circular shape: the underlying trace of the Miocene catastrophe. And a small detail: it is made with stones that house small diamonds. The wall of Nördlingen. Wolkenkratzer, via Wikimedia Walls made of diamonds. Cities usually have their stone quarry, but Nördlingen had diamonds: the meteorite impact generated an estimated 72,000 tons of them when it hit a local graphite deposit, so its stone buildings contain millions of small diamonds. The stone is not just any one either: it is the sueviteextremely rare and marbled with small greenish crystals. It is found in other locations on the planet where there were similar impacts, but the concentration of gems in Nördlingen is unique. Those who built those buildings did not know that they were working with diamonds: they discovered it after the visit of Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chaothe two American geologists who in 1960 demonstrated the origin by impact by finding shock quartz in the walls of St. George’s Church. St. George’s Church. Tkx via Wikimedia The “luxurious” church of St. George. Normally jewelry in churches is reserved for the altarpieces, but in San Jorge they are also on the walls. In fact, it was the construction that revealed the use of suevite extracted from the Ries basin. St. George’s is one of the largest late Gothic hall churches in southern Germany and was built between 1427 and 1505, when Nördlingen was Imperial. The church tower is known as “Daniel” and is 90 meters high: after climbing 350 steps you can reach the viewpoint (70 meters away), where you can observe the perfectly circular shape of the city and the crater that surrounds it. The tower also preserves one of the most unusual traditions of modern Europe: a night watchman who has been shouting before midnight since the Middle Ages to warn that everything is fine. Nördlingen, space training ground. Since impact craters also occur on the Moon and Mars, Nördlinger Ries has been used for decades as a training ground to teach astronauts to recognize the rocks and minerals created by impacts. the astronauts from Apollo 14 and NASA’s Apollo 17 studied the geology of the crater in 1970. But It is not something exclusive of the North American space agency: it is one of the three destinations of the program PANGAEA of the European Space Agency, along with the Italian Dolomites and Lanzarote. JAXA has also carried out training there. In Xataka | That Christian Friedrich von Kahlbut died in 1702 is nothing exceptional. That his corpse has not decomposed, yes In Xataka | A treasure hunter looted a shipwreck, did not reveal where he had kept the treasure and spent 10 years in prison. Now you are free to get it back Cover | Tilman2007 and Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung