Impact Craters - Science topic

Circular structures are increasingly attracting attention as a fascinating research topic in Algeria. Studies have examined these features from different perspectives (Lamali et al., 2016, 2022; Hassani et al., 2016, 2024; Sahoui, 2024; Chabou, 2024), as their occurrence often indicates hypervelocity impact events (Lambert et al., 1981) or signific...

Plain Language Summary Mercury's surface is widely covered with hollows, that is, small, localized, shallow depressions found on the surface of the planet and often linked to impact craters. We studied the global distribution of hollows and connections with other geological features. We found no evidence for a single layer of volatile materials dri...

Gosses Bluff (Tnorala) is a ~20 km diameter impact crater in the northern part of the Amadeus Basin, central Australia. The crater is believed to have formed from a comet impact at ca 140 Ma (Milton and Sutter 1987). The most reliable previous estimate of the age of the crater is based on a discordant 40Ar/39Ar age spectrum from sanidine in impact...

A two-way coupling numerical framework based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is developed in this study to model binary granular mixtures consisting of coarse and fine grains. The framework employs updated Lagrangian SPH to simulate fine grains, with particle configurations updated at each time step, and total Lagrangian SPH to efficiently...

Martian layered ejecta craters are theorized to form by impacting into an ice‐rich crust. The inference that some equatorial layered ejecta craters are Amazonian indicates that ice has persisted in the tropics. However, the detailed spatial and temporal distribution and evolution of this ice remain unknown, which is critical to constraining Mars' g...

A uniquely shaped impact structure, the Hailin impact crater, has been discovered in northeast China. The crater was formed on a granodiorite hillside and is an oval depression with asymmetric rim height and a maximum diameter of 1360 m. The bottom of the crater is filled by Quaternary sediments with large amounts of rock fragments underneath. The...

The Charity Shoal structure is a circular, ∼1.2‐km‐diameter, bedrock‐rimmed shoal in eastern Lake Ontario with a ∼20‐m‐deep central basin. The structure has been proposed as a possible Middle Ordovician impact crater or volcanic intrusion. We conducted marine seismic and magnetic surveys (9‐km²) and 3‐D geophysical modeling to better resolve the Ch...

The martian tropical water ice spatial and temporal distribution was characterized using impact crater ejecta type, location, size, and age in one of two epochs, ≤3.4 ${\le} 3.4$ Ga and >3.4 ${ >} 3.4$ Ga, using statistical models designed for spatial and temporal correlation structures. The indicator thought to identify the presence of ice is crat...

The morphology of fresh lunar craters contains information about the physical properties of both the impactors and the lunar surface, and is therefore crucial to our knowledge of the impact cratering process. Spectral analysis is a powerful tool to study crater morphology, as it can reveal the topographic variation on different scales. In this stud...

Plain Language Summary The crust of a planet is a thermal barrier, which controls how fast heat escapes to space. Depending on its thickness, the crust can strongly insulate the planet's interior preventing efficient cooling. Therefore, knowing the structure of the crust is critical to unraveling the geologic history of planetary bodies. Crustal th...

The Chinese Tianwen-2 mission is planned to explore and sample the near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3, also named 469219 Kamo'oalewa. This paper intends to answer the question of whether 2016 HO3 has any regolith. A 3D model of an irregular shape was reconstructed from light curve data of 2016 HO3, with simulated impact craters embedded on its surface. W...

The granular mechanics of lunar and Martian regolith remain inadequately understood, impeding progress in successful exploration, landing, drilling, sampling, and construction activities on extraterrestrial surfaces. This study aims to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating the granular behavior of the lunar and Martian regolith under impact co...

The formation of lunar crustal magnetic anomalies is not well understood, and most anomalies are not associated with any obvious geologic features. To investigate further, we studied lunar craters from 100 to 400 km in diameter (totaling 305 craters) that may have demagnetized the crust. We find that the four craters Chaplygin, Keeler, Gauss, and F...

In this paper we present geological and morphological evidence of comet or meteorite impact in the Tibes region of Ponce, Puerto Rico. Satellite images show a semicircular structure of about 800 m in diameter, inside which we find metamorphic rock, such as shatter cones, horsetails and impact melt rock. The SEM and EDAX analysis of the collected ge...

Oil shale as well as shale oil and shale gas are significant energy resources with huge reserves present in different parts of the world. Various geochemical proxies have been applied to assess the petroleum potential of oil shales with samples pre-treated in various ways, e.g. as whole rock or demineralized sample or as solvent extracted rock/kero...

Craters form as the lander's exhaust interacts with the planetary surfaces. Understanding this phenomenon is imperative to ensuring safe landings. We investigate the crater morphology, where a turbulent air jet impinges on granular surfaces. To reveal the fundamental aspect of this phenomenon, systematic experiments are performed with various air-j...

The previous posts indicated that knowing about impact diamonds (in meteorites or impact craters) could help to understand the so-called clippir diamonds or super deep diamonds like the Cullinan mine. In this regard, on his side and his stamp, Evan M. Smith Smith, on the other hand, but not so different, Ingrid Chinn presented the Clippir diamonds...

Plain Language Summary Venus preserves ∼1,000 impact craters, but no craters larger than 300 km—common on Mercury, Mars, and Moon—are recognized. We describe a large circular structure (∼1,500 km‐diameter) that formed on tessera terrain, Venus' oldest recognized surface type. The structure consists of concentric circular troughs that cut the tesser...

This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of the abundances and distribution of S, and the processes that control the behavior of S on the Earth's Moon and on Mercury. The two planetary bodies share notable similarities, such as lacking substantial atmospheres and featuring surfaces with high numbers of impact craters. Both objects are at vari...

A comprehensive examination using a transmitted light optical microscope was conducted to analyze the morphology and geometric parameters of kink band development in mica from the Colônia impact crater's crystalline basement rocks. Significant differences were observed between kink bands formed perpendicular and parallel to the [001] plane. Kink ba...

Studies of micrometeorites in mid-Ordovician limestones and impact craters on Earth indicate that our planet witnessed a massive infall of ordinary L chondrite material about 466 million years ago1–3 that may have been at the origin of an Ordovician ice age and major turnover in biodiversity⁴. The breakup of a large asteroid in the main belt is the...

The European Rover Challenge (ERC) serves as a global student competition and a dynamic platform where student teams from technical universities worldwide converge to design and test their innovative rover prototypes in Mars Simulant Environment. Beyond Robotics, the first Greek team to participate in ERC, demonstrated their technical and scientifi...

We present the results of stepwise crushing and combustion analyses for noble gases, carbon and nitrogen in Pesyanoe aubrite pyroxene lithologies, composed of grey (Px-G) and light (Px-B) enstatites differing in the degree of impact processing and the number of inclusions. Our study identifies three main noble gas endmembers in Pesyanoe: a cosmogen...

Rock abundances on the Moon represent both an opportunity to understand the history of the surface and of the regolith and a hazard to lander missions. While rock erasure by meteoroid bombardment is known to modify rock size˗frequency distributions, the interplay between rock erasure and rock exposure by impact cratering, and the resulting net rock...

The Nadir Crater offshore West Africa is a recently proposed near K-Pg impact structure identified on 2D seismic. Here we present 3D seismic data that image this crater in exceptional detail, unique for any such structure, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the crater-forming mechanism was a hypervelocity impact. Seismic mapping reveal...

Titan’s impact craters are hundreds of meters shallower than expected, compared to similar-sized craters on Ganymede. Only 90 crater candidates have been identified, the majority of which have low certainty of an impact origin. Many processes have been suggested to shallow, modify, and remove Titan’s craters, including fluvial erosion by liquid fro...

The United Kingdom's Natural History Museum (NHM) AI Lab Programme represents a pioneering initiative aimed at harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap between the museum's extensive collection and cutting-edge AI technologies. Despite its immense potential, the application of AI in museum research remains nascent (e.g...

Surface unloading due to impact cratering results in lava filling the crater floor. Elevation differences in the crater floor, a common geological phenomenon on the Moon, represent direct evidence of cratering processes. However, few studies have been conducted on mare-filled craters on the Moon. Al-Biruni (81 km) is a farside impact crater with an...

The northern region of Saudi Arabia hosts several impact craters and structures. This paper describes the discovery of a 4-km-wide complex impact structure located in the paleozoic sedimentary rocks of northern Saudi Arabia 210 kilometers north east of the city of Tabuk. The impact structure is composed of a central peak displaying intense folding...

The interpretation of the postulated Prosselsheim/Eisenheim impact strewn field is based on the following findings: The circular Püssensheim multi-ring structure with a diameter of 100 m for the main ring and roughly 200 m for the whole structure (see figure) with extremely small deepening has no geologically or archeologically comparable counterpa...

On Mars, the lack of either plate tectonics or a prominent erosional hydrological cycle since the Noachian means geological changes caused by asteroid and comet impact events have been preserved. On Earth, surviving impact‐induced fractures are localized to the relatively few preserved craters on the planet. We estimate that the shell of impact‐fra...

The article is the first part of a treatise on the large impact crater strewn field of the Holocene Chiemgau impact with a focus on the now huge number of craters, and a model description of typical examples, for which the craters #004 Emmerting, Kaltenbach and Mauerkirchen were selected here in the first part of addressing the small craters. The s...

Plain Language Summary The LCROSS experiment formed an impact crater in an area of permanent shadow on the Moon, striking the surface at 2.5 km/s with a 2,300 kg spent rocket body on 9 October 2009. The impact ejecta from this cratering event included detectable amounts of water and other volatiles, which is perhaps the most direct evidence for sig...

Earth's terrestrial surfaces commonly exhibit topographic roughness at the scale of meters to tens of meters. In soil‐ and sediment‐mantled settings topographic roughness may be framed as a competition between roughening and smoothing processes. In many cases, roughening processes may be specific eco‐hydro‐geomorphic events like shrub deaths, tree...

The three largest impact craters, the remains of which have been found on Earth to date, had diameters of about 200 km immediately after formation. The search for traces of larger impact structures continues. This paper presents the results of numerical modeling of the formation of terrestrial impact craters larger than those already found. It is s...

Craters form as the lander's exhaust interacts with the planetary surfaces. Understanding this phenomenon is imperative to ensure safe landings. We investigate crater morphology, where a turbulent air jet impinges on the granular surfaces. To reveal the fundamental aspect of this phenomenon, systematic experiments are performed with various air jet...

Tektites are terrestrial impact-generated glasses distributed over regions of Earth’s surface with ejection distances up to 10,000 km. The Australasian tektite strewn field is the largest and the youngest discovered so far (788 ka). However, the location of the source crater remains unsolved. The present work is the first to investigate the only mo...

The physical properties of lunar regolith are crucial for exploration planning, hazard assessment, and characterizing scientific targets at global and polar scales. The dielectric constant, a key property, offers insights into lunar material distribution within the regolith and serves as a proxy for identifying volatile-rich regoliths. Miniature ra...

Impact craters are a unique tool not only for inferring ages of planetary surfaces and examining geological processes, but also for exploring subsurface properties. We use ejecta blankets as proxies to obtain insights into the subsurface characteristics and the vertical stratification of Ganymede's icy crust. We investigated 36 prominent ray and ha...

The lunar surface undergoes various space weathering and impact processes, which shape the regolith and expose boulders. Using high-resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow Angle Camera imagery and associated Digital Elevation Models, we investigate regolith thicknesses and boulder densities at the four candidate landing sites of the Em...

Impact crater formation is affected by the physical properties of planetary crusts, allowing comparison of crater dimensions to serve as a proxy for comparing the crustal properties of different planetary bodies. New topographic profiles of Callisto craters, derived from Galileo-based digital terrain models, are presented, and the crater dimensions...

The Geological Map of South America (GMSA) at a scale of 1:5 000 000 depicts the recent advancements in geological mapping across South America. Information from national geological maps of various countries and regional maps was aggregated and standardized at the 1:5 000 000 scale and subsequently was enriched with geochronological data from index...

Nowhere in the solar system are impact morphologies observed in greater variety than on the icy Galilean satellites. This is likely a consequence of the structural and thermal state of the crust at the time of impact, and perhaps impact velocity. Palimpsest-type impact features show smooth enclosed central plains surrounded by undulating plains, wi...

SUBMITTED TO "EARTH-SCIENCE REVIEWS". Despite several, sometimes prominent propagators, meteorite impact research had a long period of peripheral status until the 1980s. Since then there has been an intensive search for impact-extinction pairs, promoted by the rapid acceptance in canonical knowledge of Alvarez’s hypothesis of a catastrophic Chicxul...

Glacier‐Like Forms (GLFs) are a subset of ice‐rich landforms known as Viscous Flow Features that populate Mars' mid‐latitudes. GLFs are morphologically similar to terrestrial valley glaciers and are thought to result from the redistribution of water ice from the Martian poles during periods of high obliquity throughout the Amazonian period. Their a...

Impact craters are crucial for our understanding of planetary resources, geological ages, and the history of evolution. We designed a novel pseudo-spectral spatial feature extraction and enhanced fusion (PSEF) method with the YOLO network to address the problems encountered during the detection of the numerous and densely distributed meter-sized im...

Rubble-pile asteroids may be the type of near-Earth object most likely to threaten Earth in a future collision event. Small-scale impact experiments and numerical simulations for large-scale impacts were conducted to clarify the size ratio of the boulder/projectile diameter effects on ejecta size–velocity distribution. A series of small-scale impac...

Deciphering geological phenomena, including planetary evolution, is accomplished by studying Earth’s impact craters. An attempt has been made to identify the buried lineament anomalies using multisensor satellite data in the Aorounga impact structure in Chad, Africa. In order to improve the visibility of buried lineaments, interferometric synthetic...

The main objective of this study is to analyze and update the impact conditions that potentially gave rise to the Monturaqui impact crater.

Meteoroid impacts produce different types of fractures and damage zones beneath impact craters. The 3D geometry of these features reflects the trajectory and energetics of an impact event. In this study, we mapped the impact damage zone beneath the 1.88‐km‐diameter Lonar crater, emplaced in Deccan basalts, using Ambient Noise Tomography (ANT). A ne...

Precise measurements of Cr isotopic composition of terrestrial impactites have successfully provided evidence for the presence of extraterrestrial material and have, in some cases, allowed the identification of the type of impactor responsible for the formation of the impact structure. The high Cr abundance in most meteorite groups aids in detectin...

The recently confirmed Hapcheon impact crater in Korea is a complex impact structure 7 km in diameter, with clear rims and impact-driven underground lacustrine sedimentary features. We investigated the lithological features of deposits within the impact crater using drilled sedimentary cores (23HIC01, 20CR05, 20CR09, and 20CR10), which consisted of...

At present, according to the Canadian database, roughly 200 craters are considered to be established impact structures worldwide, whereby the criteria for acceptance - for and against - are often regarded as extremely subjective, practiced by a very small university group, but strangely enough are regulariy used as a standard in the literature. Thi...

This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the geomorphology, crater distributions, and tectonic structures within Enceladus' cratered terrains. We analyzed the distributions of impact craters and tectonic structures in seven regions of interest to inform an interpretation of the geological history of this terrain in the context of Enceladus...

Impact craters that form on every planetary body provide a record of planetary surface evolution. On heavily cratered surfaces, new craters that form often overlap antecedent craters, but it is unknown how the presence of antecedent craters alters impact crater formation. We use overlapping complex crater pairs on the lunar surface to constrain thi...

Hypervelocity impacts can generate hydrothermal systems, which have been suggested as candidate environments for prebiotic chemistry on the early Earth. The Haughton impact structure (a 23 km diameter crater located on Devon Island, Nunavut, Arctic Canada) displays evidence of water‐rock alteration indicative of a hydrothermal system generated from...

Ejecta splashing is accompanied by the formation of impact craters in oblique impact of a sphere onto a granular target. We investigated the morphology and scaling of the ejection, together with the evolution and final size of crater by performing a series of experiments, varying the impact angle θ and impact speed V 0. The experiment categorized t...

Water ice and other volatiles that accumulated in the Moon’s polar regions are among the top priority targets for lunar exploration, due to their significances in both lunar geology and extraterrestrial resource utilization. Locating suitable landing sites and determining the provenance of sampled/measured surface materials are critical for future...

The density of craters on a planetary surface directly relates to the age of the surface. As the surface ages, however, craters can be erased by subsequent large impacts via direct overprinting, known as geometric crater obliteration. Such counts become increasingly limited as surfaces become more heavily cratered. Techniques to infer the statistic...

Oxia Planum. Используя данные с высоким разрешением, исследователи изучают особенности рельефа и свойства поверхности Oxia Planum. Передовые методы геоинформационных систем (ГИС), такие как картографирование высот и контурный анализ, проливают свет на его пригодность в качестве посадочной площадки. Исследование выявило различные геологические особе...

This richly illustrated book reviews the geology, tectonics, sedimentary basins, and strate-gic resources of North Africa in 21 chapters. Chapter 1 is a regional synthesis. Chapter 2 examines the deep crustal and upper mantle structure. Chapter 3 compares the West African Craton. Chapters 4–6 deal with Tuareg Shield (Trans-Saharan Orogenic Belt), a...

The lunar surface, which has been extensively explored and studied, offers valuable insights into its geological history and crater distribution due to the abundance of impact craters on its surface. Detecting numerous craters of different sizes on the lunar surface necessitated an automated process to avoid manual intervention, which consumed sign...