Odessa American - 6/2/04
Scientists probe Odessa meteor crater
University of Arizona researchers hope to learn more about when the impact occurred.
A team of University of Arizona scientists took samples of millennia-old dust in the Odessa meteor crater Tuesday hoping to learn more about the region’s geological history. Vance Holliday, a professor of anthropology and geoscience, said the team missed its goal of taking core samples as deep as 80 feet.
“We only got to 53 feet. It would’ve been nice to get to 70, but we’ll manage,” he said.
Despite not reaching 80 feet, Holliday said he thinks the samples collected can still help pinpoint the crater’s age.
“We’ll still be able to get a reasonable approximation of the age. We got pretty close I think,” he said. “This is a terrific core. It’s by far better than anything we’ve seen before.”
Tuesday was the third time Holliday led a team to take samples from the crater since 2001. Last year, the digging stopped at 20 feet when the corer couldn’t punch through a caliche layer.
Holliday and his team were trying to take core samples of the soil that would indicate when the meteor crashed into the soil.
“We know it’s on the order of tens of thousands of years,” he said Tuesday morning. “Basically what we’re trying to do is to get as deep as we can and date the sediment that’s filled in the crater.”
Holliday said knowing the crater’s age would help paint a picture of the changes in the Odessa landscape over eons. He said it could also give insight into the history of meteoric impacts on the earth’s surface. “The more data points we can get, the better understanding we can get of the frequency of impacts,” he said.
Research assistant James Mayer said knowing how old the crater is would give him a point of reference for his research into environmental change in the high plains region.
“A key to the whole thing is figuring out how old this damn thing is,” Mayer said.
Mayer said the team would use carbon dating and a process called luminescence dating to determine the crater’s age.
Holliday said the samples might even provide a more detailed picture of the landscape than he expected. He said he suspects the crater had served as a shallow, temporary lake at some point in its history, which is indicated by the different soil types in the samples. But Tuesday’s sample indicated the crater was filled with water at a different time than the sample taken last year.
“This core is different than last year’s, and I think it’s telling us more about the history that we didn’t know before,” he said. “There’s a good story here.”
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I never knew or heard of this and we were living 25 miles north of Cape Charles and worked 5 miles North of Cape Charles at the time.
I never knew or heard of this and we were living 25 miles north of Cape Charles and worked 5 miles North of Cape Charles at the time. Am emailing it to family.
bttt
Seismic Study of Ancient Cataclysm Begins"The seismic recordings will give us a look at the subsurface rock and sediment layers, faults, and other structures produced 35 million years ago by the Chesapeake Bay impact," said USGS scientist Greg Gohn. "This ancient event probably fractured bedrock to a depth of at least 5 miles. These surveys will tell us more about the impact processes and products and their effects on ground-water resources available today in the southern Delmarva Peninsula."
United States Geological Survey
Monday, October 4, 2004
The project will involve 30 small explosions buried at depths of about 60 feet, and about 800 seismic-shotgun blasts at depths of about one foot. As energy waves from the blasts travel through the ground they will be recorded by portable seismometers placed throughout the area. Because the ground motion being recorded is less than that caused by normal daylight activities, such as vehicular traffic or vibrations from pumps, most of the blasting and recording will be done at night, usually between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. over a 2 or 3 day period...
Scientist Rufus Catchings, who is with the USGS Western Region Earthquake Hazards Team in Menlo Park, Calif., is leading the seismic survey. He expects the high-resolution seismic imaging effort to locate crater features to depths of about one mile, and the lower-resolution survey to image structures to depths of more than 3 miles across a broad area.
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Should be lots of Iridium there if true
Global warming....natures way. It took a 2 second impact. Now add in volcanoes, earthquakes and fluctuations of the universe.