0000000000644775
AUTHOR
Christian Koeberl
Ernst Julius Öpik’s (1916) note on the theory of explosion cratering onthe Moon’s surface—The complex case of a long-overlooked benchmark paper
High-velocity impact as a common phenomenon in planetary evolution was ignored until well into the twentieth century, mostly because of inadequate understanding of cratering processes. An eight-page note, published in Russian by the young Ernst Julius Opik, a great Estonian astronomer, was among the key selenological papers, but due to the language barrier, it was barely known and mostly incorrectly cited. This particular paper is here intended to serve as an explanatory supplement to an English translation of Opik's article, but also to document an early stage in our understanding of cratering. First, we outline the historical–biographical background of this benchmark paper, and second, a …
A Dutch contribution to early interpretations of Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA – Marten Edsge Mulder’s ignored 1911 paper
Abstract Following the first scientific descriptions in the late nineteenth century, the origin of the curious structure currently known as Meteor Crater (or Barringer Crater) in Arizona (USA) remained controversial until well into the twentieth century. Within the context of commercial mining, Daniel Moreau Barringer’s view that it recorded a substratum-penetrative meteorite impact (with the cosmic body still preserved) was commonly discarded. Marten Edsge Mulder (1847–1928), Dutch professor of medicine, found fault with Barringer’s non-explosive model. In 1911, Mulder advanced, in an ignored paper written in Dutch, a novel model of an explosive meteorite (‘meteor’ in Mulder’s terminology)…