A friend emailed me a set of coordinates to enter into Google Maps, or Google Earth, or any similar program. They are: 57.599439,134.634018
It looks like a perfectly round mountain, with a ring of white and brown around it. It appears to be about 5 miles across.
The first thing that came to my mind was the Tunguska “fireball” incident but I have no idea wether ir not it has anything to do with this peculiar crater.
If the Wikipedia entry on Tunguska is correct, this is not it. According to the Wikipedia article, the location for the Tunguska event was 60°55′ N 101°57′ E.
Also, there’s nothing at this location listed in the Earth Impact Database, leading me to suspect that it formed from below, rather than from an impact from space.
IANA Vulcanologist, but it looks to me like a caldera, which is the result of the cone of a volcano collapsing on itself. The best-known example of this in the US is Crater Lake, Oregon, in which the caldera has filled with water to form the lake. A Google Earth aerial view is here.
The caldera (if that’s what it is) in the OP’s link is about half-way between the city of Yakutsk in Siberia and the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk (which, as mhendo pointed out, is a fair way from the Tunguska event, as can be sen on the map here).
The OP’s caldera looks like it might have a resurgent dome in the middle, with lava flows which joined and exited the caldera on the north side.
The Kamchatka peninsula, east of the Sea of Okhotsk, has many active volcanoes, and you can see another caldera here.
Here you go, folks. A little more investigation has yielded success.
This landform is the Gora Konder Crater.
According to NASA:
Thanks! It looks pretty impressive on Google Earth, but it is so big that if you were there you might not even realize it.
That’s IF you could get there.
Since the OP has been answered, I venture to hijack this thread. I copied the coordinates posted in the OP and pasted them into Google Earth, and it actually got me to the crater this thread was about, at 57.599439° North, 134.634018° East. How? The coordinates given were just a string of numbers without any designations about W/E longitude and N/S latitude. Is there a universal conventions that latitudes and longitudes without designations are to be interpreted as North and East by default?
Yep, there sure is.
When using the Decimal Degrees long/lat designations, all positive numbers are North and East, negative numbers are South and West.
you can read about this and other long/lat designation systems at maptools.
Sorry to be so late oming in here, but I have another question. Doesn’t Google Maps handle DMS notation (like"60°55′ N 101°57′ E")? Certainly I can convert minutes to the fraction, and using +/- for directions is no problem, but cut-and-paste is much handier.
