From Nanotech Now:

A meteorite impacting the earth under a grazing angle of incidence can do a lot of damage; it may travel a long way, carving a trench into the ground until it finally penetrates the surface. The impact site may be vaporized, there can be large areas of molten ground. All that remains is a crater, some debris, and an extensive trail of devastation on both sides of the impact site.

Hitting a surface with high-energy, heavy ions has quite similar effects – only on a much smaller scale. At TU Wien (Vienna), Prof. Friedrich Aumayr and his team have been studying the microscopic structures which are formed when ions are fired at crystals at oblique angles of incidence.

 

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Image Credit:   TU Wien

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