Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunnelling to the Earth’s centre. This impact forces the Northern Hemisphere to retreat, which, consequently, forms the core of Hell as a bottom-up crater, while the earth displaced behind Satan creates the mountain of Purgatory as a central peak.
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In this light, the nine circles of Hell are no longer merely symbolic tiers of sin, but rather a remarkably accurate description of the concentric, terraced morphology found in multi-ring impact basins across the solar system, from the Moon to Venus. Anticipating the non-Euclidean geometry later found in the Paradiso, Dante intuitively mapped the physics of terminal velocity and crustal breach required for a massive object to reach maximum compression at the Earth’s core.