I'll bet that not many of you have heard of Manson, Iowa, (pop. 2000) but not to worry...that's why I'm here. A while back - 50 million years or so, a rock weighing 10 billion tons, about 11/2 miles across and traveling at 150,000 mph, smashed into the area around Manson, Iowa. According to my good buddy Bill Bryson [A Short History of Nearly Everything] this was the biggest event to occur on the mainland U.S. - ever!!! It left a hole 3 miles deep and 20 miles across. It seems that 2.5 million years of glacial activity has completely filled in the crater. The impact site is now flat as a pancake.
In the 1980s it was briefly considered to be the impact site causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. That honor now goes to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It has a crater 170 miles wide and 35 miles deep. That's a big hole.
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