Recreating the Extreme Forces of an Asteroid Impact in the Lab

About 50,000 years ago, a nickel-iron meteorite some 50 meters across plowed into the Pleistocene-era grasslands of what is now Northern Arizona. It was traveling fast--about 13 kilometers per second. In just a few seconds, an impact dug out a crater just over a kilometer wide and spread rocks from the site for miles around. …