ABSTRACT
The Meteor Crater in Arizona and the crater field in the Siberian taiga bear witness to this. Additionally, Stutzer attributes the origin of the Nördlinger Ries to the impact of a gigantic meteor of several kilometres diameter. The Austrian Robert Gangolf Schwinner published a short, polemical comment on Rohleder's paper: 'Meteor craters are one of the latest fashions in geology and are now discovered everywhere in the strangest and wildest regions of the Earth, in Arizona, Arabia, Transvaal and now also in Swabia'. Schwinner had begun to study engineering at the Technical University in Vienna. Schwinner did not believe in an impact in the absence of evidence of actual meteoritic material in its vicinity. Schwinner's main argument, however, was the heat balance. He estimated the temperature of the meteorite to have been less than 900ºC, because above this threshold the target limestone would decompose and the octahedral structure of meteoritic iron would disappear.
