What does an impact crater from a small meteor look like?
Small meteors less than a few yards across and weighing a few tons, to my best knowledge, seem to leave holes in the ground directly under their impact point. We keep imagining something like a small version of the Arizona Meteor Crater, but such bodies are a hundred feet across and carry enough energy to produce quite a depression and all the collateral damage…rims, fractured rock, etc. A crater some 40 meters across would, to my knowledge, be very unusual requiring the right kind of soil/rock and the right kind of meteoritic material. To produce a crater 10 meters across, it is estimated that you need a meteor about 1/2 meter in diameter. If the crater is quite round, some remnants of the meteor may still be found near the center of the crater, perhaps buried below the surface several meters. If you are lucky and it was an iron/nickel meteor, it may be detectable with a metal detector if it is not too far underground .
