World Heritage site in FS likely
2005-07-12 19:26
Johannesburg - South Africa could become home to a seventh World Heritage Site if the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) gives the over 2 000 million-year-old meteorite crash site near Vredefort in the Free State the title on Wednesday.
The 29th session of Unesco's World Heritage Conference in Durban was expected to make the announcement after discussions behind closed doors.
Delegates were examining a list of possible sites before making their decision by on Wednesday or early Thursday, said Genevieve Jones, spokesperson for the 2005 World Heritage Committee meeting.
SA boasts with six heritage sites
There are over 788 World Heritage sites in 134 countries. Africa has 63 sites, while South Africa has six - three cultural, two natural and one mixed. They are Robben Island in the Western Cape; the Cradle of Humankind, comprising the fossil hominid sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and environs in Gauteng and North West; the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal; the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park in KwaZulu-Natal; the Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape in Limpopo; and the Cape Floral Region of the Western Cape.
Forty-two new sites were being proposed for inscription worldwide.
The incident that shook the world
A professor of mineralogy at Wits University described the mountain-sized meteorite - with a diameter of 10km - that crashed into the earth near Vredefort as the single greatest geological catastrophe yet uncovered on the planet.
"The four minutes that quite literally shook the world, resulted in the creation of an enormous impact crater in the ground," said Wolf Uwe Reimold, professor of mineralogy in the school of geosciences.
Of the 175 impact craters found thus far on Earth, three giants stood out, Reimold said.
These were Chicxulub in Mexico, Sudbury in Canada, and the Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa. Vredefort, with a diameter of 300km, was by far the largest of the three.
"Each of these impact events catastrophically altered the global environment and was strong enough to drastically change life on our planet."
- SAPA