Journey to Wabar II
For British explorer Harry St. John Philby, the end of the journey was a disappointment. 75 years ago this month, after trekking hundreds of miles across the Arabian desert in search of a lost city, he found two holes in the ground. The largest was hundreds of feet across, and dozens of feet deep. Bits of iron and glass littered the site -- but no evidence of a city.
Philby mapped the site, which he called Wabar for the legendary lost city, then turned his attention elsewhere. But scientists remembered his reports, and over the decades they studied the site in greater detail.
Their work showed that Wabar was hit by fragments of a meteorite that weighed at least 3500 tons.
The impact probably happened between 150 and 450 years ago. The fragments hit with as much energy as the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. They blasted out at least three craters, and sealed their sides by melting the sand to form "instant rock."
They also blasted thousands of tons of iron and sand high into the air. Blobs of melted sand stuck together to form beads of black glass, which fell over a large swath of desert. Bits of iron fell back to Earth, too. And in the 1960s, an expedition found a chunk of iron that weighed more than two tons.
Today, sand has almost filled the craters. So the scars of a cosmic impact -- discovered in the search for a city that legend said was swallowed by the desert -- are themselves being buried beneath the Arabian sands.
Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2006
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