Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Dude! Cool article about a pristine meteor crater site, known as "Wabar", deep in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, which Beduin lore holds (falsely!) to be the divinely-destroyed city of Ubar. Why falsely? Apparently because the site post-dates the Koranic story of Ubar by at least nine hundred years, and it might be less than two hundred years old. That, and they've found the actual site of Ubar hundreds of miles away. But the crater site itself is apparently a deeply cool place in and of itself, regardless of the lore. The details of just how inhospitable the location is - "On our weeklong third expedition, furious sandstorms destroyed our camp twice, and the temperature never dropped below 40 degrees C, even at night" - sound almost like tall tales.

Link via Rantburg.

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