Meteor craters of Kazakhstan.

“Look how the stone looks evilly,
The gaps in it are strangely deep
A hidden flame flickers beneath the moss;
Do not think, then do not fireflies!"

Nikolai Gumilev. "A rock". A.I. Gumilev.

A trip to the Zhamanshi crater.

Territory Zhamanshin (Mount Zhamanshin) is a geomorphological meteorite crater located in the Irgiz district of the Aktobe region of the Republic of Kazakhstan. One of them left in his memory 40 km south of the village of Irgiz.
The diameter of the crater reaches 10 kilometers; there is also a less pronounced outer ring. The age calculated by the radiological method is 12 million years. Scientists suggest that the composition of the meteorite was stone, since there were no fragments of meteorite iron in the crater and the okrug.
The meteorite fell on solid rock, and from impact they turned into dense vitreous bodies with inclusions of various minerals and fragments. These rocks re-melted during the impact were called impactites, which means "turned into glass."
Native nickel, nickel iron, rare minerals, and small diamond crystals were found in impactites. According to the results of radiogenic analysis, the age of the crater is about 1 million years ago (according to other estimates - up to 53 million years).
According to the most widely accepted hypothesis, it was formed as a result of a meteorite (possibly an asteroid or a comet's nucleus) falling to Earth with a diameter of 200 to 400 meters, which evaporated during the explosion.
At the time of the explosion, the ambient temperature in the fall region reached 1700 ° C. Immediately after the explosion, the depth of the crater was at least 500 meters (possibly even 1000 meters). Currently, the maximum height difference is 250 - 300 meters.
The scientist of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences E.P. Izokh, for many years developed the hypothesis of the origin of tektites, according to which the crater is about 10 thousand years old.
This hypothesis allows us to eliminate the contradiction between the radiogenic age of the crater tektites and the age of geological rocks around the crater, in which there is an impact layer associated with the formation of the crater (Izokh E.P. Kashkarov L.L. Genaeva L.I.).
The age of the glasses of the impact crater Zhamanshin according to track studies // Traces of space impacts on the Earth: Sat. scientific labor. - Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1990 .-- S. 188-193 This is one of the few deposits of tektites (Irgizites) on Earth and the only crater in which tektites and impactites are simultaneously found. Leshelaterite (foamed quartz), trivalent titanium are also found in the crater. The crater is a nature reserve of the Irgiz region. As a tourist attraction, it is popular with tourists.
According to researchers, Zhamanshin is a place not so bad, but unusual. Here you can literally walk along the fossilized mollusks and corals, which are supposed to lie in the many-meter thick earth's surface, here you can find large stones, but some of them even a child can lift with one hand.
At this very place, almost a million years ago, when a person had just learned to process stones, tapping them against each other, substances that were no longer on Earth or in space were smelted from earthly rocks in a hellish furnace.
Giant pressure and unimaginable temperature destroyed the surface of the planet. At some point, the crust in a small area of ​​the Aral Sea region became liquid. Waves went through the molten magma, just as they come from a stone thrown into a puddle.
The shock wave reared rocks, pushed, overturned layers. This formed the inner rampart of the Zhamanshinsky crater, a kind of “time machine”, a slice of the history of our planet over hundreds of thousands of years. A huge force lifted into the air blocks of stone the size of a house and threw them a few kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion, a fiery rain spilled onto the planet.
The planet shuddered. Something in her movement subtly changed and after some time a glacier began to attack from the poles. However, the ice age is not the worst thing that could bring a meteorite. Indeed, when 65 million years ago the Yukotan meteorite collided with the Earth, a stone with a diameter of 8 kilometers, dinosaurs became extinct.
Not only dinosaurs - 90% of the living mass on Earth ceased to exist. For such a change in the rocks, which we see here, a temperature was needed that instantly rose to 1700 ° C. Under such conditions, some minerals simply boiled, foamed.
But the surface cooled quite quickly and dezhelateryrite, quartz capable of floating in water, appeared. The substances evaporated during the explosion were coordinated, hardened and fell to the ground with rain of special glasses - tektites.
Zhamanshin tektites are called Irgizites by the name of the river Irgiz. And also because this word is very reminiscent of the Russian "spray", black spray, scattered in different directions from the space wanderer. Irgizits were born on Earth a million years ago. But parts of their substance are older than blacks spray "4000 times.
Tektites are a rare occurrence on our planet. On the whole earth no more than a dozen of their locations are known. However, Irgizites are unique even in such a small company. In 1912, for the first time in the world in the Irgiz region, the remains of a giant mammal, indricater, were found.
This large animal, reaching a length of 8 m, lived in park-like forests that once grew on our land. On the banks of the Ilek River were found the horns of a gigantic deer, the skull of a primeval bull; on the territory of the Martuk district, individual mammoth bones, near the city of Alga - the remains of large ammonite.

Authority:
Books "Nature of Kazakhstan", ed. Kazakhstan, Almaty, 1978 http://www.avestnik.kz.

Photos
Alexander Petrov.