David T. King, Jr.

• Ph.D.; P.G.
• Professor at Auburn University

The central uplift area of Araguainha impact structure (Brazil) includes a quartzite pebble‐ and cobble‐bearing stratigraphic facies that have been profoundly affected by impact processes. These quartzite clasts have been studied previously for their planar deformation features (PDFs), but not with regard to their noteworthy transverse fractures. P...

Wetumpka impact structure is a Late Cretaceous, marine‐target impact crater of about 5 km diameter. The apparent crater rim is mostly made of crystalline local basement, and the apparent crater floor consists of a mixed sediments of target lithology. These sediments are the provenance of the crater‐filling impactite sands, overlying trans‐crater sl...

Impact-produced glassy objects (tektites) in northwestern Belize presently occur in a limited area of about 950 km 2. Compared to other known tektite strewn fields on Earth, this one is relatively small. Belize tektites were formed about 800,000 years ago owing to the thermal energy of a cosmic impact event (crater-producing or air-burst) that melt...

The informal upper Paleocene to lower Eocene Red Bank group crops out in several areas of the Cayo and Orange Walk districts of northern Be-lize including the study area of the present report, which is the area around the oil fields of Spanish Lookout and Never Delay. Previous studies, which assigned the wrong age to the Red Bank group, described t...

Up to now, the widely used Mesozoic and Cenozoic chronostratigraphy of Belize has been based upon estimations and assumptions made by geological pioneers working in that country decades ago. During the 1950s, Giovanni Flores and C. G. Dixon, working independently, studied and named most of the informal, post-Paleozoic lithostratigraphy of the forme...

Previous studies of hydrogen emanations from semi-circular, shallow depressions (SCSDs) of enigmatic origin at many places in the world have shown that these depressions are vents for significant amounts of hydrogen gas emerging from the subsurface. Further, geological investigations of the deep subsurface realm beneath the areas where there are su...

A Paleogene sedimentary succession of the informally named Toledo formation crops out in the Toledo District of southern Belize along the newly cut Mile 14 highway. These outcropping strata in the southern Belize Basin have organic-rich beds that were analyzed for their hydrocarbon source potential. The Toledo formation is up to 3000 m thick in the...

Up to now, the widely used Mesozoic and Cenozoic chronostratigraphy of Belize has been based upon estimations and assumptions made by geological pioneers working in that country decades ago. During the 1950s, Giovanni Flores and C. G. Dixon, working independently, studied and named most of the informal, post-Paleozoic lithostratigraphy of the forme...

The southeastern US, speci cally Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina, is a relatively stable geological area of the North American craton, and because this is a signi cant consideration regarding deep borehole waste storage or disposal operations, the potential for this activity is discussed herein. Using a set of siting crit...

Plain Language Summary Water in lunar shadowed regions is redistributed by various processes. When small craters form on a large crater's wall, its topography gradually erodes. Surface materials and deposited water move downhill, leading to a mixture of these materials and accumulations on the complex crater's floor. Here, we analyze 16 complex cra...

To fully assess the resilience and recovery of life in response to the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary mass extinction ~ 66 million years ago, it is paramount to understand biodiversity prior to the Chicxulub impact event. The peak ring of the Chicxulub impact structure offshore the Yucatán Peninsula (México) was recently drilled and extracted...

The present paper examines the potential for at least some of the world's deeply buried complex impact structures, 4 to 25 km in diameter, as possible sites for carbon sequestration. The thesis presented here is that the complex impact structure's central uplift, which is a type of structural dome, could be a useful carbon-sequestration reservoir,...

We analyze thermal emission spectra using the 2001 Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System and the Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer to characterize grain size and mineralogical composition of dunes at Hargraves crater, Mars. Thermal inertia and bulk composition of the dunes were compared to inferred provenances from the therm...

We analyze thermal emission spectra using the 2001 Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) and the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) to characterize grain size and mineralogical composition of dunes at Hargraves crater, Mars. Thermal inertia and bulk composition of the dunes were compared to inferred prove...

The rim wall of water formed from even a modestly-sized marine impact may be kilometers in height. Although modeling has shown that this wave swiftly breaks and relatively rapidly loses energy during outwards travel from the impact site, the portion of the rim wall that collapses inwards may generate a resurge flow with tremendous transport energy....

The impact of cosmic objects of significant size into Earth's oceans generates stratigraphic relationships that are predictable and worthy of note by geologists. These include crater-filling stratigraphy, crater-rim stratigraphy, proximal ejecta stratigraphy, and distal ejecta stratigraphy. Each of these distinct stratigraphic relationships is exam...

Laterally equivalent strata of the Cretaceous Yucatan Group, the target stratigraphic section of the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact event, occur in areas adjacent to Mexico, including northern Belize. In the absence of readily available subsurface data on lithologies within the Yucatan Group, it is a good strategy to use the relatively well known...

The Mars Global Digital Dune Database (MGD3) contains information on Martian dune fields and prepared manually from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS; 100 m/pixel) images. Although the MGD3 outlines dune fields, it overlooks the recognition of smaller dune forms. This paper aims to identify individual dunes from a semiautomated object‐bas...

This dataset includes an ArcGIS vector (.shp format) file containing spatial information on the individual dunes at Hargraves crater, Mars

Sedimentological (line‐logging) analysis of two drill cores, FC77‐3 and FC67‐3, situated, respectively, in the northwestern and southeastern quadrants of the Flynn Creek impact structure's crater‐moat area reveals that the ~27 m thick crater moat‐filling breccia consists of three subequal parts. These parts, which were deposited during early modifi...

The Toledo formation in the Belize Basin of southern Belize is an informal Lower Cenozoic (Paleogene) stratigraphic unit, which consists of conglomerate, sandstone, interbedded sandstone and mudstone, and detrital limestone. The Toledo was deposited in a submarine-fan system and is presently well-exposed in southern Belize, particularly along and n...

The Margaret Creek formation (Upper to Middle Triassic) is mainly a clastic red-bed unit, which is the lowermost among several Mesozoic formations comprising the Corozal basin of northern Belize. The Margaret Creek formation at the de facto 'type locality' near St. Margaret's Village is a fluvial sedimentary deposit, which consists of numerous fini...

The Flynn Creek impact structure is an approximately 3.8 km diameter, marine‐target impact structure, which is located in north central Tennessee, USA. The target stratigraphy consists of several hundreds of meters of Ordovician carbonate strata, specifically Knox Group through Catheys‐Leipers Formation. Like other, similarly sized marine‐target im...

The delineation of dune fields in MGD3 were prepared manually through visual photo-interpretation from the THEMIS imagery at 100 m/pixel spatial resolution, including the digitized dune parameters and mapped dune slipface orientations. However, the manual digitizing of the dune parameters from low resolution THEMIS images demands very tedious and t...

The delineation of dune fields in the Mars Global Digital Dune Database (MGD3) were prepared manually through visual photo-interpretation from the THEMIS imagery at 100 m/pixel spatial resolution, including the digitized dune parameters and mapped dune slipface orientations. However, the manual digitizing of the dune parameters from low resolution...

We interpreted surficial geology, including possible geologic history, of Siloe Patera by combining investigations of spectral analysis from TIR data of THEMIS, mineralogic phases (e.g., olivine, phyllosilicate, and hydrated silicates) from NIR data of CRISM, and local morphology from HiRISE and CTX.

Siloe Patera, like other collapsed volcanic features at Arabia Terra, Mars has been identified as a set of nested deep depressions [1]. We interpreted surficial geology, including possible geologic history, of Siloe Patera by combing analysis of spectral analysis from TIR data of THEMIS, mineralogic phases (e.g. olivine, phyllosilicate, and hydrate...

We interpreted Siloe Patera having a variety of surface geology coupling with thermal response (e.g. thermal inertia) of the surface materials.

The study interprets details of surficial geology from combining morphology and thermal response (thermal inertia) of surficial materials of Siloe Patera using the available high-resolution orbital dataset of Mars.

The Flynn Creek impact structure was originally recognized in 1968 by David Roddy as one of the original six confirmed impact structures on Earth. The Flynn Creek impact structure is also the first recognized marine-target impact structure. Exposure at Flynn Creek varies, as there is no obvious rim and the geological map of the area does not look l...

We found the nighttime median thermal inertia values of 155 - 529 Jm-2K-1s-1/2 and the bolometer albedo values of 0.10 - 0.24. Based on the thermophysical characteristics we interpreted the area having a variety of surface materials. Our linear regression analysis shows a very weak positive correlation between albedo and thermal inertia, a very wea...

Lake Ejagham is a small, shallow lake in Cameroon, West Africa, which supports five endemic species of cichlid fishes in two distinct lineages. Genetic evidence suggests a relatively young age for the species flocks, but supporting geologic evidence has thus far been unavailable. Here we present diatom, geochemical, mineralogical, and radiocarbon d...

Post-collisional volcanic rocks on the Tibetan Plateau and its margins contain valuable information about the geodynamic processes associated with this Cenozoic continent-continent collision. The Quaternary Tengchong volcanic field at the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau formed high-potassium calc-alkaline volcanic rocks. Herein, we prese...

Coesite has been identified within ejected blocks of shocked basalt at Lonar crater, India. This is the first report of coesite from the Lonar crater. Coesite occurs within SiO2 glass as distinct ~30 μm spherical aggregates of “granular coesite” identifiable both with optical petrography and with micro-Raman spectroscopy. The coesite+glass occurs o...

Deposition of the Toledo formation represents a distinctive shift in regime from a carbonate-dominated basin to a clastic-dominated basin following the collision of the Maya and Chortis blocks of the North American and Caribbean plates, respectively, near the end of Late Cretaceous. We analyzed the sedimentologic and stratigraphic record of the Tol...

The Toledo formation of Belize is a thick sequence of clastic deep water facies developed within a succession of submarine fan complexes adjacent to the Maya Mountains, along the northern margin of the Belize basin. The Toledo formation ranges in thickness from 100 – 10,000 ft (30 – 3,000 m) and is underlain by the “KT” boundary interval and/or the...

The Toledo formation in the Belize Basin is an informal Paleogene unit consisting of interbedded sandstone-mudstone, sandstones, conglomerates, and limestones, which are exposed in southern Belize. We examined the petrology and syndepositional environments of the carbonates in the Toledo formation, which have relatively minor occurrences. The tan t...

The Toledo formation (mainly Paleogene) is a thick series of clastic facies developed within a succession of submarine fan complexes which formed adjacent to the Maya Mountains along the northern margin Belize basin. The Toledo formation ranges in thickness from 100 to 10,000 ft (30 to 3000 m), and is underlain by the 'KT' boundary interval and/or...

In northern Belize, there is a remarkable record of primary continuous ejecta and reworked (or secondary) discontinuous ejecta, which comprises the Cretaceous-Paleogene ('KT') boundary interval that lies directly on top of the local Maastrichtian bedrock. These boundary deposits, which are preserved in a series of north-trending grabens, occur at t...

At Wetumpka impact structure, the surficial polymict impact breccia crops out discontinuously over a relatively small area within the intrastructure terrain. This polymict breccia unit contains a significant number of shocked quartz grains that represent a slightly lower shock pressure regime than the previously documented shocked quartz population...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the lived experiences from the voice of the authors (a science professor, an instructional designer, a distance learning doctoral intern, and a distance learning director) in the process of transitioning a face-to-face science course to online modality at a large, research university. Design/met...

A method for processing an incoming message in substantially real-time is provided. The method may include receiving the incoming message in response to a condition associated with a client device. The incoming message may be processed using a message handler and an approved rule. The approved rule may be operatively associated with an approved mes...

Siloe Patera is a newly identified volcanic feature that contains multiple collapse events and possible lava flows.

At Wetumpka's marine target impact crater, Upper Cretaceous target chalk has been eroded and redeposited as a post-impact resurge unit near and within the crater.

The Margaret Creek formation of Belize (Upper Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous [?]) is mainly a clastic unit, which is situated in the Corozal Basin of northern Belize. The Margaret Creek ranges in thickness from zero to approximately 800 ft (243.6 m) in the deeper reaches of the Corozal Basin of northwestern Belize. The Margaret Creek formation at the...

Geomorphological features result from a combination of factors such as material strength, structure, and the forces of nature. An impact crater is a good example. In an ideally simple situation (e.g., a vertical impact of a spherical object into a homogeneous target), the resulting crater will obtain a perfectly circular shape. Any deviation from t...

The Chicxulub impact event produced accretionary lapilli (or carbonate spherules) that fell across a wide area. This paper compares Chicxulub ('KT') accretionary lapilli from two sites in Belize: Albion Island and Armenia.

Structural measurements reveal a significant fold structure produced by impact excavation within the western rim of the Wetumpka impact structure.

The Kilmichael, Mississippi, structure has been proposed as a meteorite impact site. This study examines drill cores from the site to evaluate this hypothesis.

Accretionary lapilli up to 2 cm in diameter occur within an impactoclastic bed at the KT boundary in the village of Armenia, Belize.

Siloe Patera is a newly identified volcanic feature that resembles a caldera with multiple collapse features, possible subsidence, and lava flows.

Onshore stratigraphy of northern Belize consists of (1) a thick section of deformed and metamorphosed Carboniferous-Permian sedimentary and volcanic strata in the Maya Mountains, (2) a moderately thick section of Mesozoic strata, mostly carbonates, which are found in the subsurface and in outcrop near the Maya Mountains and along major faults, and...

Single crystal (U-Th)/He dating was applied to 24 apatite and 23 zircon grains from the Wetumpka impact structure, Alabama, USA. This small approximately 5-7.6km impact crater was formed in a shallow marine environment, with no known preserved impact melt, thus offering a challenge to common geochronological techniques. A mean (U-Th)/He apatite and...

New geological mapping at Wetumpka impact crater (Alabama) has been aided by the use of recently obtained lidar data to make a base-map DEM and to construct new and more accurate geological cross sections, which are presented here.

We report here on the geology observed when the El Paso Gas Company reopened its existing natural gas pipeline cut going west-east across the whole of the Wetumpka impact structure, Alabama.

We report the latest results from (U-Th)/He zircon and apatite dating of big and small terrestrial impact structures, including Manicouagan, Charlevoix, Lake Saint Martin, Ries and Steinheim, Bosumtwi, Wetumpka, Karikkoselkä, and Monturaqui.

Introduction: ~80% of the known terrestrial impact structures have either never been dated, or have poorly constrained ages (i.e., >10% errors) [1]. The reason for these poor age constraints, and the main challenge in dating impact structures, is that the U-Pb, Rb-Sr, K-Ar systematics in 90% of the target rocks are not completely reset during an im...

The Wetumpka impact structure (near the town of Wetumpka, Alabama) has a semicircular crystalline rim that is ~5 km in diameter. This marine-target impact structure developed in both poorly consolidated, water-saturated sediments and underlying crystalline basement. Previous studies have described a semicircular, crystalline rim, an interior struct...

The impactoclastic layer (< 1 m) at the base of the Paleocene Clayton Formation at Shell Creek, Alabama, U.S.A., consists of two parts of approximately equal thickness: a lower poorly sorted and graded layer of coarse, conglomeratic, microtektite pseudomorph-bearing quartzose sand and an upper layer consisting of thinly laminated and hummocky cross...

This abstract examines the results of shallow core-hole drilling from 1998 to 2009, including data from eight wells. Litholigic logs from the eight wells are presented and interpreted in this presentation.

The section at Baillif Hill in the intrastructure terrain of the Wetumpka impact structure contains a sequence of impact breccias and mixed sedimentary and crystalline megablocks. These deposits were previously known only from depths of

The Wetumpka impact structure is a marine target impact feature with resurge chalk deposits. CT analysis of 25 m of resurge chalk drill core shows many previously unrecognized sedimentary structures reflecting resurge processes.

Introduction: Wetumpka is a  7.6 km diameter, marine-target impact structure in the inner coastal plain of Alabama (Fig. 1a; [1-3]). Paleogeographical studies show that the Wetumpka impact occurred in shallow marine water  30-100 m in depth, within ~ 25 km of the local barrier-island shoreline [2-5]. The structure is transitional between a simple...