Ames, D.E., Buckle, J., Davidson, A., and Card, K., 2005. Wash-in post impact sediment (the impact happened in a shallow sea). Because the Sudbury Structure has been deformed since its formation,its large-scale subsurface geometry remains a matter of conjecture. There are many craters documented on this site. Of cleavage development in the chelmsford formation, sudbury basin, ontario. Approximately 4 km of erosion over the eons has obliterated the crater rim. The Sudbury Structure is interpreted to represent the tectonized and deeply eroded remnant of a multi-ring or peak-ring impact basin (Stoffler et al). Over the past two decades, geologists have reached a consensus that a large meteorite impact occurred at Sudbury Ontario, 1,850 million years ago. With a diameter of 130 km, the Sudbury Basin in Canada is the third-largest crater in the world. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . [16] This magma formed into pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite and pentlandite rocks,[17][18] as well as cubanite and magnetite. Furthermore, the Sudbury Structure is also a unique example of a very large differentiated igneous body with remarkably simple boundary conditions. The Creighton Deep Project is currently mining and actively exploring well below the 7500-ft. level, maintaining its status as the deepest working mine in the western hemisphere. The greenish rock is secondary alteration of clays and micas from existing minerals within the rock. It is possible that the documented north-northwest thrusting of the South Range over the North Range has resulted in a central uplift being covered by the allocthonous rocks, but there is no evidence to support this. The impact melts may not fully cool for hundreds of thousands of years. The Sudbury Structure is situated within a unique Geotectonic setting in northeastern Ontario, being sandwiched between: The transgressive nature of the passive margin produced a sequence which onlapped and thinned progressively toward the northwest. Sulphide immiscibility occurred during cooling of the SIC, probably before much of the SIC had reached its liquidus temperature. The boundary of the Proterozoic-age (~1 billion-year-old) Grenville Geologic Province presently lies approximately 10 km to southeast of the SIC. The SIC is overlain by the 1.8 km thick Onaping Formation. 303-318. We propose a new working model in which only the lower part of the Onaping Formation was derived by explosive melt-fuel-coolant interaction when seawater flooded onto the impact melt sheet in the basin floor. Lateral collapse and structural uplift in the center worked together to form a crater approximately 200 km in diameter. Meteor crater is a meteorite impact crater about 37 mi (60 km) east of flagstaff and 18 mi (29 km) west of winslow in the northern arizona desert of the united states.the site had several earlier names, and fragments of the meteorite are officially called the canyon diablo meteorite, after the adjacent caon diablo. [citation needed], Due to the high mineral content of its soil, the floor of the basin is among the best agricultural land in Northern Ontario, with numerous vegetable, berry, and dairy farms located in the valley. The entire period of activity of a fault filled with pseudotachylite may be measured in minutes. The more energy is released, the more damage is likely to occur on the ground due to the environmental effects triggered by the impact. A meteorite believed to be 10 to 16 kilometres in diameter hurtles from space striking the area now known as Sudbury, Ontario (700 kilometres away)! The lowest beds of the Group, the lower Onaping Formation, represent impact-generated breccia and fall-back material, the upper Onaping Formation and the overlying Onwatin Slates represent the restricted crater series, while the succeeding Chelmsford Sandstone represents an open marine turbidite sequence. This site uses cookies. Land. (F. Brunton private correspondence with the author). 2. Reports published in the late 1960s described geological features that were said to be distinctive of meteorite impact, including shatter cones[12] and shock-deformed quartz crystals in the underlying rock. The rocks of the Whitewater Group comprise (oldest-to-youngest): initially glass-rich breccias of the Onaping Formation, carbonates and argillites of the Vermilion and Onwatin formations, and arkosic sandstones and wackes of the Chelmsford Formation (Brunton). The Grenville orogeny occurred 800 million years after the Sudbury Crater was formed. the Archean-age (>2.5 billion-year-old) Superior Geologic or Structural Province, situated to west and north of the structure, and; the Proterozoic-age (>1.9 billion-year-old) Southern Geologic or Structural Province Huronian Supergroup, deformed by the (1.9 billion year-old) Penokean orogeny , and situated to west, south and east of the Sudbury Structure. The meeting will be held at the Laurentian University, 935 Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, ON P3E 2C6 on August 5-8, 2013. Notable geologist instructors included William R. The relatively light weight, low cost and the versatility of thisslim-hole technology makes it the method of choice for the mineral explorationindustry worldwide. 277-281. [8], The full extent of the Sudbury Basin is 62km (39mi) long, 30km (19mi) wide and 15km (9.3mi) deep, although the modern ground surface is much shallower. It is easy to guess that Sudbury is located in Canada. Sudbury Basin formed by comet, not asteroid, researcher says. The SIC has the single largest magmatic nickel source in the world. The No. Addison, W.D., Brumpton, G.R., Davis, D.W., Fralick, Philip W., and Kissin, S.A., 2010, Debrisites from the Sudbury impact event in Ontario, north of Lake Superior, and a new age constraint: Are they base-surge deposits or tsunami deposits? I cant believe it. Inward collapse of the transient crater walls was accomplished along detachment surfaces, now preserved as anastomosing networks of pseudotachylite-filled faults (Sudbury Breccia) tens of km in length. Read online free From Meteorite Impact To Constellation City A Historical Geography Of Greater Sudbury ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. What are the signs of a meteorite impact on Earth? The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is housed in a cavern as large as a 10-story building, in the deepest section of the Creighton Mine. The SIC is overlain by the 1.8 km thick Onaping Formation. Historically, breccias of this formation were debated in the context of an endogenic versus an impact-fallback origin. Sudbury breccia, a thick slice of a sulfide produced a huge impact. This area experienced an instantaneous melt at impact 1.8 billion years ago. People have been making use of the minerals in Sudbury Basin for thousands of years. A regional seismic-reflection survey, Line 42 of the LITHOPROBE Sudbury transect traverses the Levack gneiss, northwest of the North Range, associated with the Sudbury Structure. Scientists believe such warm mineral-rich venues could have played a role in the early development of life on Earth. L'anomalie suggre par la prsence de sdiments dposs dans un vaste environnement marin et prsentement restreints au seul Bassin de Sudbury est attribue une prservation prfrentielle due la subsidence produite par la compaction au-dessus du cratre et de la rgion fracture par l'impact. The finding suggests large impacts, such as those that took place during a short period after the Earth was formed, can be followed by intense, long-lived, and explosive volcanic eruptions. A weak fracture halo is developed to the north, exterior to the Igneous Complex. The extent of SB bodies has been used to estimate the size of the Sudbury crater (e.g., Dressler et al., 1987, Grieve, 1994, Deutsch et al., 1995, Spray, 1999 ). The controversy over the origin of the Sudbury Structure and the Sudbury Igneous Complex was ongoing before the beginning of mining in the area. Those who used this training on the Moon include Apollo 15's David Scott and James Irwin, Apollo 16's John Young and Charlie Duke, and Apollo 17's Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt. The compositions of quartz, K-feldspar, calcite, biotite, and chlorite minerals are similar to each other in all of the samples, although the relative proportions of the minerals vary from site to site. Under the Sudbury Basin are thousands of kilometres of drifts (lateral tunnels) and shafts (vertical to inclined tunnels) cut into the SIC to extract nickel. The Sudbury Impact Basin is the deeply eroded remains of the 1.85 Ga original bolide impact that formed a 200-250 km multi ring crater with a core comprising of an elliptical, 60 x 30 km layered 2.5 km thick impact melt sheet referred to as the Sudbury Igneous Complex (SIC). The apparent anomaly of the occurrence of sediments deposited in an extensive marine environment and presently only found within the Sudbury Basin is attributed to preferential preservation, due to compaction-generated subsidence over the crater and impact-fractured area. They are commonly found beneath impact crater floors, usually in the central uplifts of complex impact structures, but they may also be observed in isolated rock fragments within brecciated units. Wash-in post impact sediment (the impact happened in a shallow sea). Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City: A Historical Geography of Greater Sudbury. Mystery of Giant Crater Solved", "Mineralogy of Cu-Ni-PGE ore and Sequence of Events in the Copper Cliff South Mine, Sudbury, Ontario", "OHP - "SALTER'S MERIDIAN 1856" - Ontario Provincial Plaques on Waymarking.com", Fallbrook Gem and Mineral Society Sudbury Structure page, Aerial Exploration of the Sudbury Impact Structure, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sudbury_Basin&oldid=1119325398, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2021, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 31 October 2022, at 23:29. The Blezardian orogeny caused the formation of basement-cored tight folds in the metasediments, which were peneplained and submerged by 1850 Ma. Then after a shockwave shattered the surrounding rocks, minerals from the melted rock below infiltrated the cracks. The Sudbury Meteorite Impact and its Traces in Thunder Bay. It appears that Alanis Morrisette's beloved homeland has an inordinate number of meteor craters, with the one near Sudbury. Comment by Roland Dechesne, geologist and fellow RASC member about the Hillcrest deposits: The lapilli were poorly preserved and could have, potentially, been any number of things. Piccaninny Impact Structure, Western Australia, Bulls Eye The Richat Structure, Mauritania, NASA Goddard Space The Sudbury Basin (/sdbri/), also known as Sudbury Structure or the Sudbury Nickel Irruptive, is a major geological structure in Ontario, Canada. It consists of impact melt breccia, suevite and reworked suevite from: Fall-back (collapse of the original crater) and Fall-out (impact debris) forming a 2 km post impact sediment over the SIC melt rock; and. The Sudbury Structure is situated within a unique Geotectonic setting in northeastern Ontario, being sandwiched between: The transgressive nature of the passive margin produced a sequence which onlapped and thinned progressively toward the northwest. The end of this quiet period was signaled by the abrupt appearance of the 850 metre-thick siliciclastic turbidites (sedimentary deposits settled out of muddy water carrying particles of widely varying grade size caused by turbidity currents) of the Chelmsford Formation (Rousell, 1972, 1984), which have been interpreted as a flysch apron deposited in the foredeep ahead of an advancing late Penokean mountain front (Young et al. A large impactor would blast away this weight, releasing the pressure on the buried rocks and causing the underlying minerals to melt. Shatter cones are shock-deformation features that form from impact pressures of typically 2-10 GPa up to ~30 GPa (the GPa, or gigapascal, is a unit of pressure that corresponds to 9900 times atmospheric pressure). Since its discovery, a layer of breccia has been found associated with the impact event[11] and stressed rock formations have been fully mapped. My father was involved in the mining industry before the onset of WWII and he always thought that the structure was somehow involved with volcanic activity. The Sudbury Structure (Canada) offers the only example of a basin-sized(250 km diameter) impact structure on Earth that can be examinedat a range of stratigraphic levels from the shocked basement rocks ofthe original crater floor up through the impact melt sheet and on throughthe fallback material and the crater-filling sedimentary sequence. Despite this, the crater has had a lasting impact on the region. This paper presents new evidence bearing on the original size and shape of the Sudbury impact structure. The basin is located on the Canadian Shield in the city of Greater . Astronauts capture the first confirmed image of the structure taken from the International Space Station. These features, which include planar sets in quartz parallel to the (0001) and (1013) planes, suggest that the Onaping formation consists of shocked and melted material deposited immediately after a meteorite impact which formed the Sudbury basin. Jones, A.P., 2005. Tectonism has possibly deformed the original crater into an ellipse. The size of the underground workings at Creighton dwarfs all man-made structures on the surface of the Earth. This basin is the second largest verified asteroid impact crater on Earth! Lateral collapse and structural uplift in the center worked together to form a crater approximately 200 km in diameter. Interestingly, they were in a coarse sandstone that had discontinuous thin blebs of cherty quartz that gave me the impression of being fiamme. I found this idea fascinating and I think that this was probably where my interest in meteorite craters originated. Price, G.D., Price, N.J., Decarli, P.S., and Clegg, R.A., Fracturing, thermal evolution and geophysical signature of the crater floor of a large impact structure: The case of the Sudbury Structure, Canada. Avermann, M. E., Sudbury project (University of Munster-Ontario Geological Survey): (1) Summary of results - an updated impact model (abstract). Further into the structure is the Whitewater Group, a 1400 m thick section consisting of fall-back of the original country rocks that has been hydrothermally altered. A Historical Geography of Greater Sudbury. Map Series no P3187 1998. The SIC is this type of large melt sheet produced from crustal melting resulting from a cosmic impact. They represent the only distinctive and unique shock-deformation feature that develops on a megascopic scale (e.g., hand sample to outcrop scale). Current opinion is almost unanimous that the structure is a multiring basin with an original diameter of about 200 km and a circular shape that has since been shortened in a northwest-southeast direction by Penokean deformation Evidence for this interpretation, collected chiefly from north . This geologic schematic of the Sudbury structure illustrates the present day remnant of the Sudbury Meteorite Crater comprising of: Thick sheets of melted rocks line the bottom of many large meteor craters. If these events also involved tectonic shortening within the North Range (as has been documented for the South Range), then the original size of the Sudbury impact structure has been underestimated. The Sudbury basin was formed by a 10-15 km wide asteroid or comet impacting a shallow sea in what is now central Ontario, Canada 1.85 billion years ago. Detailed investigation of the petrology and composition of the rocks has revealed that protracted, submarine, explosive volcanic activity took place after the impact. The uplift at the centre of the impact was so strong that a 25-km section of Earth's crust was turned on end. Specific Features: The Sudbury structure is the oldest and largest impact structure in North America. The crater had an original diameter, after the collapse of the initial transient crater, of in excess of 200 km. Approximately 1 km south from Windy Lake is a hill containing the North Range lower zone of the SIC. The Sudbury basin formed as a result of an impact into the Nuna supercontinent from a bolide approximately 1015km (6.29.3mi) in diameter that occurred 1.849 billion years ago[2] in the Paleoproterozoic era. The relief of the basin is apparent in the map below. After impact, the entire 1.85-Ga Sudbury structure was affected bynorth-west directed thrust faulting, folding and associated lower amphibolitefacies metamorphism. The relative abundances of calcite, phyllosilicates, and feldspars are similar in each zone within individual lapilli. Fiamme: lens-shapes, usually millimetres to centimetres in size, seen on surfaces of some volcanic rocks. Categories: Impact Breccia, Impactites. Tectonophysics, 474: 493-506. Naldrett, A.J. A further difficulty in proving that the Sudbury complex was formed by meteorite impact rather than by ordinary igneous processes was that the region was volcanically active at around the same time as the impact, and some weathered volcanic structures can look like meteorite collision structures. These salt and pepper coloured felsic norite rocks consist of medium course crystalline, igneous textured plagioclase containing white feldspar and dark pyroxenes & mica. 1992. [21], Due to the then-remoteness of the Sudbury area, Salter's discovery did not have much immediate effect. The ores fractionated as they cooled, giving rise to a Cu-, Pt-, Pd- and Au-enriched residual liquid which moved into the footwall, exploiting impact breccia and zones of pseudotachylite-like Sudbury Breccia.Some significant questions remain unanswered. Field and petrological evidence indicate that the pseudotachylytes were formed at 1850 Ma by comminution and frictional melting due to impact-induced faulting. Reports of the National Center for Science Education. I remember being in high school when my science teacher mentioned that he had recently read a paper hypothesizing that the Sudbury Structure may be the result of a meteorite impact and that it had happened long before any life had evolved to survive on land (evolution was not allowed to be taught in Ontario schools at that time!). Sudbury Basin is the third-largest crater on Earth, after the 300km (190mi) Vredefort impact structure in South Africa, and the 150km (93mi) Chicxulub crater under Yucatn, Mexico. Muehlberger. This formation occurred during a period of quiescence after the impact basin formation. The impactite rock appears as shattered fragments of the Gunflint Iron Formation and chert (quartz rich cemented in a rusty matrix of volcanic ash). It is located in Ontario, Canada. in diameter. It hostsone of the worlds largest concentrations of magmatic Ni-Cu-Pt-Pd-Aumineralization and has produced more than $100 billion worth of metal inover a century of production. The target rocks, which remained within the crater after the impact, ponded to form a sub horizontal sheet of magma and differentiated as it cooled. (Addison 2005). The former municipalities of Rayside-Balfour, Valley East and Capreol lie within the Sudbury Basin, which is referred to locally as "The Valley". But few craters are as large or as old. The basin is located on the Canadian Shield in the city of Greater Sudbury, Ontario. Recent investigations indicate the importance of meteorite impact as a process which has operated throughout geologic time to produce numerous originally circular structures as much as 50 km in diameter. The meteorite that gave birth to Sudbury was mostly nickel. The. [citation needed], The Whitewater Group consists of a suevite and sedimentary package composed of the Onaping (fallback breccias), Onwatin, and Chelmsford Formations in stratigraphic succession. The magnitude of scientific information describing the Sudbury Structure over the years has amplified my desire to fully explore this crater and others. They appear in outcrops as distinctively curved striated fractures that typically form partial or complete conical structures (image).
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