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Impact crater

"Meteor crater" redirects here. For the impact crater in Arizona named "Meteor Crater", see Meteor Crater.

Impact craters in the Solar System
500-kilometre-wide (310 mi) crater Engelier on Saturn's moon Iapetus
Mare Orientale on the Moon, a prominent well-structured example of a multi-ring basin
Recently formed (between July 2010 and May 2012) impact crater on Mars showing a pristine ray system of ejecta[1]
50,000-year-old Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona, U.S. on Earth

An impact crater is a depression in the surface of a solid astronomical body formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller object. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion or internal collapse,[2] impact craters typically have raised rims and floors that are lower in elevation than the surrounding terrain.[3] Impact craters are typically circular, though they can be elliptical in shape or even irregular due to events such as landslides. Impact craters range in size from microscopic craters seen on lunar rocks returned by the Apollo Program[4] to simple bowl-shaped depressions and vast, complex, multi-ringed impact basins. Meteor Crater is a well-known example of a small impact crater on Earth.[5]

Impact craters are the dominant geographic features on many solid Solar System objects including the Moon, Mercury, Callisto, Ganymede, and most small moons and asteroids. On other planets and moons that experience more active surface geological processes, such as Earth, Venus, Europa, Io, Titan, and Triton, visible impact craters are less common because they become eroded, buried, or transformed by tectonic and volcanic processes over time. Where such processes have destroyed most of the original crater topography, the terms impact structure or astrobleme are more commonly used. In early literature, before the significance of impact cratering was widely recognised, the terms cryptoexplosion or cryptovolcanic structure were often used to describe what are now recognised as impact-related features on Earth.[6]

The cratering records of very old surfaces, such as Mercury, the Moon, and the southern highlands of Mars, record a period of intense early bombardment in the inner Solar System around 3.9 billion years ago. The rate of crater production on Earth has since been considerably lower, but it is appreciable nonetheless. Earth experiences, on average, from one to three impacts large enough to produce a 20-kilometre-diameter (12 mi) crater every million years.[7][8] This indicates that there should be far more relatively young craters on the planet than have been discovered so far. The cratering rate in the inner solar system fluctuates as a consequence of collisions in the asteroid belt that create a family of fragments that are often sent cascading into the inner solar system.[9] Formed in a collision 80 million years ago, the Baptistina family of asteroids is thought to have caused a large spike in the impact rate. The rate of impact cratering in the outer Solar System could be different from the inner Solar System.[10]

Although Earth's active surface processes quickly destroy the impact record, about 190 terrestrial impact craters have been identified.[11] These range in diameter from a few tens of meters up to about 300 km (190 mi), and they range in age from recent times (e.g. the Sikhote-Alin craters in Russia whose creation was witnessed in 1947) to more than two billion years, though most are less than 500 million years old because geological processes tend to obliterate older craters. They are also selectively found in the stable interior regions of continents.[12] Few undersea craters have been discovered because of the difficulty of surveying the sea floor, the rapid rate of change of the ocean bottom, and the subduction of the ocean floor into Earth's interior by processes of plate tectonics.

  1. ^ Timmer, John (6 February 2014). "Spectacular new Martian impact crater spotted from orbit". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 5 May 2022. Retrieved 26 September 2022. The time window on the impact, between July 2010 and May 2012, simply represents the time between two different Context Camera photos of the same location
  2. ^ Lofgren, Gary E.; Bence, A. E.; Duke, Michael B.; Dungan, Michael A.; Green, John C.; Haggerty, Stephen E.; Haskin, L.A. (1981). Basaltic Volcanism on the Terrestrial Planets. New York: Pergamon Press. p. 765. ISBN 0-08-028086-2.
  3. ^ Consolmagno, G.J.; Schaefer, M.W. (1994). Worlds Apart: A Textbook in Planetary Sciences. Prentice Hall. p. 56. Bibcode:1994watp.book.....C.
  4. ^ Morrison, D.A.; Clanton, U.S. (1979). "Properties of microcraters and cosmic dust of less than 1000 Å dimensions". Proceedings of Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 10th, Houston, Tex., March 19–23, 1979. 2. New York: Pergamon Press Inc.: 1649–1663. Bibcode:1979LPSC...10.1649M. Retrieved 3 February 2022.
  5. ^ "Barringer Crater". American Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  6. ^ French, Bevan M (1998). "Chapter 7: How to Find Impact Structures". Traces of Catastrophe: A Handbook of Shock-Metamorphic Effects in Terrestrial Meteorite Impact Structures. Lunar and Planetary Institute. pp. 97–99. OCLC 40770730.
  7. ^ Carr, M.H. (2006) The surface of Mars; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, p. 23.
  8. ^ Grieve R.A.; Shoemaker, E.M. (1994). The Record of Past Impacts on Earth in Hazards due to Comets and Asteroids, T. Gehrels, Ed.; University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, pp. 417–464.
  9. ^ Bottke, WF; Vokrouhlický D Nesvorný D. (2007). "An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probable source of the K/T impactor". Nature. 449 (7158): 48–53. Bibcode:2007Natur.449...48B. doi:10.1038/nature06070. PMID 17805288. S2CID 4322622.
  10. ^ Zahnle, K.; et al. (2003). "Cratering rates in the outer Solar System" (PDF). Icarus. 163 (2): 263. Bibcode:2003Icar..163..263Z. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.520.2964. doi:10.1016/s0019-1035(03)00048-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 July 2009. Retrieved 24 October 2017.
  11. ^ Grieve, R.A.F.; Cintala, M.J.; Tagle, R. (2007). Planetary Impacts in Encyclopedia of the Solar System, 2nd ed., L-A. McFadden et al. Eds, p. 826.
  12. ^ Shoemaker, E.M.; Shoemaker, C.S. (1999). The Role of Collisions in The New Solar System, 4th ed., J.K. Beatty et al., Eds., p. 73.

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