Bolaven Plateau: People, places and things beyond headlines

A geography lesson?
A bit of astronomy and geology. It is about a meteorite.

One more that might crash upon us sometime soon?
No, this was in the past. A huge meteorite had crashed into the Bolaven Plateau.


When was that?
About 800,000 years ago, it may have crashed in this area in Laos.

How big was it?
About 1.2 miles wide and the debris flew across three continents. Scientists have been tracking debris, basically glass blobs, also known as tektiles, of a certain age across continents. Now they have found the crater.

How long have they been looking?
For about a century, scientists have been looking in this part of Asia. They believe the crater is buried below the lava that flew out of a volcano nearby.

A hidden crater? Then how did they manage to find it?
By measuring for gravitational pull of the material – if a crater is filled with material that came later, there is a difference in the pull and it can be detected.

But how did they know exactly where to look and measure?
See, the solidified lava here is around 780,000 years old and the flying tektiles were 800,000 years old. That’s two plus two, no?

Genius. Now tell me about tektiles.
Oh yes. These glass blobs are a kind of natural time markers that tell us when a huge rock might have plunged into earth and in which part of the world.

There would be millions of them, no? Can we collect some?
Maybe if we are in Laos, there will be a few left, surely.