Staring Us In The Face?

Okay, bear with me on this one.

The other day I had a whole lot of down time at work, so I fired up Google Earth and started looking around. I will admit that prior to this I had been on some NASA or JPL site looking at Pluto or Mars and the obviously catastrophic geological history of both those planets, noting in particular how it seems that something large collided with Pluto at some point in its history.

As the globe in Google Earth was rotating into view, there it was; something I'd looked at a hundred times but never really saw: what looked a humungous, heavily eroded impact crater encompassing northeast Arizona, southeast Utah, northwest New Mexico, and the southeast corner of Colorado.

Okay, so I'm sure that geologists will tell me it's nothing and that if something that big ever hit the earth it would not just be an extinction level event, but a planet-r/ending one as well, but look at how the mountain ranges seem to form a ring around the valley. That area was also extremely active volcanically at one time (not surprising if something big hit—or skimmed off the planet), so my community-college level of understanding of geology kicked in and made a connection that undoubtedly isn't there.

The basin—if it is a basin—is not perfectly circular, so if it's the result of an object coming in in, it came in at an angle, and that's why I'm suggesting it wasn't so much as an impact but a mere grazing.

Yeah, I'm know instinctively that it's nothing beyond fodder for my imagination, and I come off sounding like one of those guys who see broken pottery, machinery and tiny humans on the photos beamed back from the Mars rovers, but I have no plans to make any 30 minute videos to back up my proposition. That being said, it's still fun to contemplate, since there is still so much we don't know about the history of our planet and our universe…

Plus it gets my mind off politics for a while, and today I can really use some "intellectual" escapism.