Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2023

9 MAY-JUNE 2023 M agnetic field strength meas- ured in and around the “Do- maine du Meteore”−Crater, corrected against daily variations. A clear re- duction towards the crater floor is obvious. The size of the symbols re- flects the reliability of each measure- ment. Smaller symbols reflect a lower reliability. [F.E. Brenker et al.] Cailleux. He limits himself to stating that: “It is not easy to evaluate the significance of the strong magnetic anomalies observed. It may be that some iron mass is hidden below the ground. The high magnetic declina- tion is limited to the crater and its immediate surroundings, and this might give us some hints in this di- rection. I have not the least doubt that we are here dealing with a me- teor crater.” In the concluding part of his article, the Danish astronomer states that: “As the ages of the two craters men- tioned here seem to be of the same order, it is reasonable to ascribe them to fragments from one single meteorite. If this is right, we may also think that the other and less im- portant craters in the region are also meteoric and produced on the same occasion. Further examination of these remarkable formations will surely lead to interesting results. The craters are well preserved in spite of the intensive cultivation of the soil. Nobody in the region had the least suspicion of the origin of these holes, and everyone was very astonished to learn that ‘Le Clot’ was a marvel of nature.” say, the ravine at Cabrerolles is from the quaternary age, and this tells us that the crater is, astronomically, a recent formation; it should not be older than 10,000 years.” Here the author provides a first esti- mate of the age of Le Clot, reiterat- ing that the crater is superimposed on a large moat dating back to the Quaternary. Considering that this geological period began two and a half million years ago, the dating could appear very approximate, were it not for the fact that the to- pography of the craters in Hérault and the area surrounding them sug- gest a very recent age. It should be noted that although the structure of Le Clot resembles that of Hyginus, the latter is of volcanic origin. Luplau Janssen does not elaborate on the question of the magnetic anomalies highlighted by Gèze and In the years that followed, the idea that in Cabrerolles there was a vine- yard inside an impact crater took hold more and more, until, in Febru- ary 1964, the spotlights were turned on again on Le Clot, following the publication in Meteoritics of an arti- cle entitled “A re-examination of the craters in the Faugères-Cabrerolles region of southern France.” The author, Carlyle Smith Beals (as- tronomer at the Dominion Observa- tory in Ottawa, Canada) contested the conclusions of the previous works, stating that the nature of the magnetic anomalies and the height of the crater rim (decidedly lower than the 15 meters foreseen by the theory), together with other pecu- liar characteristics, were not suffi- cient to decree its meteoritic origin. Two years before the publication of