Meteorites meteorite impact craters around the world an introduction to meteorites mass extinctions climate change meteorite impacts on earth 2015 ebook young h court amazonca kindle store. Impact craters huge objects are not slowed much by the atmosphere and their violent collisions with earth have blasted out impact or meteorite craters throughout earths 46 billion year history these objects would have been totally vapourized in the process leaving only the crater scars formed by shock waves to record the events these . Impact craters are formed by the transfer of energy from a moving mass meteorite to a stationary body planet kinetic energy is the energy of motion it is defined as one half the mass of an object times the velocity of the object squared ke 1 2 mv2 objects in space move very fast so this can be a huge amount of energy in an impact. The sound of the explosion was heard half way around the world in london there are probably at least 1000 asteroids larger than 1 km in diameter that cross the orbit of earth one of these hits the earth about once in a million years or so on the average larger ones are less numerous and impacts are less frequent but they do sometimes happen and with disastrous consequences the impact of a