Giant Meteor May Have Created Comets, page 1

What may be the largest crater on Earth has been discovered using satellite data that shows a crater lying beneath the ice sheet in Antarctica. The asteroid impact that created the crater is believed to have anhilated 90% of all species on earth at the time of impact.

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The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath a sheet of ice and was discovered by scientists using satellite data, Ohio State University geologist Ralph von Frese said.

Von Frese said the satellite data suggests the crater could date back about 250 million years to the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out, paving the way for dinosaurs to rise to prominence.

"This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," he said.

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There is another theory that arises out of polar meteor impacts. That theory is that comets may be a by-product of metoer impacts on polar regions of planets.

The most commonly accepted theories have been that comets collect their ice while in distant orbits around the sun. Recent observations of disintegrating comets may be proving that theory wrong.

It may well be that the various comets that orbit in our solar system are giant ice fragments that have been thrown into space by meteors impacting polar ice caps. This would also mean that comets, though all made of ice, may not all be made of water. They may well be made of frozen methane, carbon dioxide, H2O or any other chemical that freezes on the various polar caps of the planets in our solar system.

Wouldn't it be interesting to retrieve and analyze fragments from a nearby comet to find that there are earthly frozen fossiles in the ice? It would be amazing to find frozen fish, penquins, bears, bacteria or any other type of fossile floating in space.

Such ice fragments could find their way to land on Mars or other planets. Then when we eventually land on mars and find these fossiles, would we jump to the conclusion that life must have originated on mars and moved to earth?...or would we consider the possibility that the fossiles might have been hurled there by a meteor impact on earth?