This city is playing tricks on youThis is Nördlingen, a city in Germany famous for its location

This city is playing tricks on youThis is Nördlingen, a city in Germany famous for its location in the center of an impact crater. After all, you can tell just by looking at it right?Actually this city is playing a trick on you. The crater that holds the city influences the circular shape of the city, but the crater is far, far bigger than this tiny area. The city itself is about 1 kilometer across; the Reis crater has a diameter of 26 kilometers, and Nördlingen is about 6 kilometers away from the center.The city walls define the circular pattern of the city. If you look at images of the city and surrounding area from above, its clear that the crater influenced the region’s development: the circular pattern is reflected both in the location of the city’s walls and in the boundaries between fields surrounding the city. These circular patterns may reflect various geologic processes such as faulting and filling of the crater by lakes after it formed, all of which would work together to create subtle circular patterns throughout the area that were partially recognized as the city was built. Before it was understood that the Earth does host large impact craters, it was thought that this area could be a volcanic crater.Nördlingen and the Ries impact structure were made famous in part by scientist Gene Shoemaker, who helped recognize the presence of rocks generated by the impact of an asteroid in this spot about 15 million years ago. The tall church at the center of town is now famous as having been constructed of suevite –a rock consisting of shattered chunks of rock and glass produced by the energy of the impact. During the 1960s, astronauts training for the Apollo missions to the moon even visited Nördlingen to see the structures generated by impacts in person before walking on the moon.-JBBImage credit:http://imgur.com/bxaYsxy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/05/nordlingen-crater-town_n_6081956.htmlRead more:http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~obrien/Nordlingen2011/http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8554http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/a14ries.html -- source link

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