3 June 2004
Sudbury crater: Impact factor
The Sudbury structure in Ontario, Canada, was a cause of controversy for many years. At issue was how it was formed. Various geological events were proposed, but by the 1960s it was recognized as an impact structure. Today the Sudbury Basin is an oval structure about 60 km by 27 km, but the original structure was over 200 km in diameter, created 1.85 billion years ago by a meteorite about 10 km across. The crater, though, is still a cause for controversy as geologists seek to explain how the composition of rocks in the region was affected by the impact. In the latest contribution to the debate, Mungall et al. suggest that the hypervelocity impact at Sudbury could have caused a partial inversion of the layers of the continental crust.
Geochemical evidence from the Sudbury structure
for crustal redistribution by large bolide impacts
JAMES E. MUNGALL, DOREEN E. AMES & JACOB J. HANLEY
Nature 429, 546–548 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02577
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