Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2023

11 MAY-JUNE 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING Cabrerolles-Faugères region was formed by a cluster of meteorites and it would be in order to search for other causes.” Beals seems to be glossing over the crux of the controversial magnetic anomalies associated with Le Clot. That said, in a footnote to his article, he underlines the objective difficulty of interpreting those types of anom- alies and the possibility that the sce- nario encountered is compatible with the fall of a meteorite with a low metal con- tent. Nevertheless, the au- thoritative overall negative judgment of Beals regarding the craters in Hérault caused them to be forgotten for almost 60 years. In fact, it was necessary to get to the present day to hear about Le Clot again. It happened in mid-March, dur- ing the 54 th Lunar and Planetary Science This most recent chapter of the ad- venturous story of Le Clot (and, by reflection, of the nearby craters) began in the summer of 2021, when Brenker and his wife were on holi- day in Marseillan Plage, a seaside re- sort in the Hérault department. A bottle of the fine wine produced at the Do- maine du Météore had stimulated the scien- tist’s curiosity. Being that Cabrerolles was just an hour’s drive away, Mr. and Mrs. Brenker left for the winery to visit the crater (and taste the local products). During the visit they collected several samples from the bottom of the crater, later to be ex- amined in the labora- tory on their return to Frankfurt. The encour- aging results of that S ection of impact breccia found in Le Clot Crater. Breccia is a jumble of fragmented stones cemented together in a fine matrix. The 1-euro coin (23 mm or 0.9 in) provides the scale of the image. [F.E. Brenker et al.] O ne of Le Clot's spherules, dis- sected to examine the internal distribution of shock diamond, quartz and mica based on structural measurement applying Raman-spec- troscopy. [F.E. Brenker et al.] Conference. In that meeting, the Ger- man geologist and cosmochemist Frank Brenker, from the Goethe Uni- versity Frankfurt, presented a new and in-depth study of the crater, with a title as long as it is significant: “Im- pact origin of the ‘Domaine du Météore’−crater, France. Compelling mineralogical and geophysical evi- dence for an unrecognized destruc- tive event in the heart of Europe.”