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Planetary impacts

Craters unchained

Nature volume 394, pages 221–223 (1998)Cite this article

Ever since the appearance of those beautiful ‘string of pearls’ images, created by the break up of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994, planetary geologists have been excitedly looking for chains of impact craters caused by similar events. A good case can indeed be made that the lines of craters called ‘catenae’ on the Jovian satellites Ganymede and Callisto were created by the impact of other tidally split comets1. There are even two crater chains on Earth's moon that may have been caused by an asteroid or comet originally split up by the Earth's tidal forces2,3.

But what of crater chains on the Earth itself? Several candidate alignments of terrestrial craters have been proposed, and these putative relatives of catenae have been eagerly pursued by both science journalists and planetary scientists. However, a critical appraisal of one of the most extensive proposed crater chains on Earth, published by John Luczaj in Geology4, will tend to head off the stampede towards interpreting aligned dents in the Earth as the result of impacts.

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Figure 1: Geological structures in the midwestern United States that can be attributed to impacts (stars) or to probable volcanic activity (circles).

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  1. the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, 85721, Arizona, USA

    H. J. Melosh

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Melosh, H. Craters unchained. Nature 394, 221–223 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28271

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