Karoo (crater) Karoo (crater) Karoo is an impact crater on the Asteroid 253 Mathilde, named for the Great Karoo Basin, a coal basin in South Africa. It is 33.4 kilometers in diameter and was the most prominent crater seen during NEAR Shoemaker's Flyby of the Asteroid. The critical crater diameter is the scale at which cratering “goes global” and results in a solitary distinct crater. All smaller craters—however large D might be—are local events. Mathilde is thus a particularly interesting case, since it is the largest asteroid imaged at sufficient resolution to show that its topography is clearly exogenic, governed by impacts.
Gulf of Oman desert and semi-desert Gulf of Oman continuing along past Muscat to the beaches and dunes of the Ash Sharqiyah Region. From the Ras al Hadd point it runs south along the coast to the desert island of Masirah. It also includes an inland strip running along to the southwest of the Al Hajar Mountains. In the UAE it covers the plains around the Al Hajar mountains in the east, in the emirates of Dubai, Sharjah and Ras Al-Khaimah, and the country's Al Batinah coast around Fujairah. This dry ecoregion contains a mixture of habitats including mangrove swamps, lagoons and mudflats on the coast,