Sudbury Basin - Wikiwand 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. However, if the finite-difference algorithm of Wheeler (1996) is used to calculate combined Ar loss and the accumulation of radiogenic Ar for the K-bearing phases, it is possible to reproduce the range of observed ages. 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. 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. Subsequent stress was supported by the fault as though it had never been active. Original crater altered by subsequent geologic processes Sudbury Igneous Complex Localized around the rim of the basin. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. Open daily, the trails are used in all four seasons for hiking, cycling, running, walking . Because the Sudbury Structure has been deformed since its formation,its large-scale subsurface geometry remains a matter of conjecture. This caused the rock along and within these dykes to partly melt. John Young, Apollo 16 at Rene Descartes highlands, Protracted volcanism after large impacts: Evidence from the Sudbury impact basin. It contains world-class ore deposits, associated with the Sudbury Igneous Complex, which represents the differentiated original impact melt sheet. The fractional crystallisation exhibited by the felsic norites and quartz gabbro of the SIC has not been documented in melt sheets of other impact craters that are apparently of equivalent size to the Sudbury structure. ; 2009 A Field Guide to the Geology of Sudbury Ontario. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. More than $1 billion of metal ores including those bearing nickel, platinum, and copper are mined from the melts each year. The mining took a toll on the landscape, polluting the region with sulfur dioxide and metals released during smelting processes. In addition,any deep drilling project will make use of wire-line diamond drills with core diameters considerably smaller than drills used in the petroleumindustry. In the immediate area of the shattered bedrock are samples of the Matachewan dykes. Geochemical evidence suggests that the impactor was likely a chondrite asteroid or a comet with a chondritic component. This geologic feature has captured the attention of astronauts for about as long as NASA has sent humans into orbit around Earth. The lower zone of the SIC is 500 metres thick. Scientists believe such warm mineral-rich venues could have played a role in the early development of life on Earth. We propose that the volcanic activity was initially fed by crustal melts directly produced by the impact, but that with time, volcanic activity was progressively fed by magmas originating at deeper levels within the Earth. A combination of the ground water and the chemical nature of the organic material in the particular layers, determines the size. 10 Biggest Impact Craters On Earth]. Hole in the Earth (e.g., Pseudotachylite is a rock type formed by friction-induced melting, during very rapid deformation) (Philpotts 1964; Maddock 1983). There are many craters documented on this site. Research shows comet as cause of Sudbury crater Accordingly, the region primarily supplies products for consumption within Northern Ontario, and is not a major food exporter. Future deep drilling atSudbury will test competing 3-D subsurface models derived from the existingshallow borehole, geological, structural and geophysical data. Sudbury Impact Structure - NASA Earth Observatory After 1.85 Billion years the striations on the shatter cone illustrated above are still recognizable. The SIC is believed to be a stratified impact melt sheet composed from the base up of sub layer norite, mafic norite, felsic norite, quartz gabbro, and granophyre. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Note the large fragment in the lower right of the image that is hydrothermally altered and surrounded by a chilled margin (a mineralized area around the fragment caused by a hydrothermal vent). A new mechanism for upper atmospheric accretion is proposed, whereby ash ejected from impact events concentrates at altitudes of neutral buoyancy, where it then accretes and is deposited later than ballistically emplaced particles. Meanwhile, space debris contains more siderophile elements than the Earth's crust, and space rocks such asasteroidstypically contain more of these elements than do comets, which are known as the "dirty snowballs" of the solar system. Astronauts capture the first confirmed image of the structure taken from the International Space Station. ; Evolution of Ideas About the Origin of the Sudbury Igneous Complex and its Associated Ni-Cu-PGE Mineralization. Scientists believe such warm mineral-rich venues could have played a role in the early development of life on Earth. The crater had an original diameter, after the collapse of the initial transient crater, of in excess of 200 km. A 2 day off-road event with full COVID protocals in place: Off-Road Triathlon, 21km, 10km, and 5km Trail Runs, plus Youth Runs XTERRA World Triathlon Championships spots The 200-m-thick impact melts found within the Sudbury Crater are a treasure trove of minerals. A biogenic origin of the carbonaceous material (soot) found in the black Whitewater Group is theoretically caused by the evaporation/condensation from the hot impact fireball and/or from a later global cloud. Iron-loving elements To answer that question, Petrus and his colleagues took a second look at the chemistry of the rocks from themassive crater. 2023 XTERRA Conquer the Crater Trail Run - Sudbury, ON 2023 - ACTIVE The crustal rocks underlying the crater would have experienced substantial fracturing from the impact and the shear concentration of the billions of tonnes of the metal-rich rock that subsequently formed could have easily have created more fracturing while sinking down deep into the crust. Formation of the original crater The Sudbury Structure is situated within a unique Geotectonic setting in northeastern Ontario, being sandwiched between: the Archean-age (>2.5 billion-year-old) Superior Geologic or Structural Province, situated to west and north of the structure, and; The Sudbury impact structure is the eroded remains of a 1.84 Ga, 150-260 km diameter impact basin situated on the boundary between the Superior and Southern Provinces in Ontario, Canada (Fig. Time units are either in ka (thousands) or Ma (millions) of years. [citation needed], The main units characterizing the Sudbury Structure can be subdivided into three groups: the Sudbury Igneous Complex (SIC), the Whitewater Group, and footwall brecciated country rocks that include offset dikes and the Sub layer. New research by Laurentian PhD candidate Joe Petrus suggests the Sudbury basin was the work of a comet, which blasted through the atmosphere at a speed of about 50 km . Debris from the impact was scattered over an area of 1,600,000km2 (620,000sqmi) thrown more than 800km (500mi); and ejecta rock fragments ejected by the impact have been found as far away as Minnesota.[4][5][6]. A large impactor would blast away this weight, releasing the pressure on the buried rocks and causing the underlying minerals to melt. 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). However, because of its northern latitude, it is not as productive as agricultural lands in the southern portion of the province. Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs | Opinion. The recently discovered distal ejecta from the 1850 Ma Sudbury impact event contain abundant accretionary lapilli generated during the impact and deposited at great distances from the crater. Piccaninny Impact Structure, Western Australia, Bulls Eye The Richat Structure, Mauritania, NASA Goddard Space May 16, 2007. This project was one of my lifelong dreams realized and I am still amazed at the magnitude of the event that created this structure. We have studied the geological materials filling one of the largest and best preserved impact structures on Earth: the Sudbury impact structure in Ontario, Canada. The sulphides settled into embayments in the impact crater wall and were injected into earlyemplaced melt occupying the offset fractures. Sudbury crater in Ontario, Canada, clocks in at 81 miles (130 km) wide and 1.85 billion years old, close in age and size to Vredefort crater in South Africa. Image of the Day Most of the SB dikes dip vertically or steeply and apparently have no obvious preferred orientation with respect to the present shape of the Sudbury Structure. Conquer the Crater raises $63,000 in Sudbury | Sudbury Star Am., special Paper 465. Sudbury Basin formed by comet, not asteroid, researcher says. [1] The crater was formed 1.849 billion years ago in the Paleoproterozoic era. The controversy over the origin of the Sudbury Structure and the Sudbury Igneous Complex was ongoing before the beginning of mining in the area. [16] This magma formed into pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite and pentlandite rocks,[17][18] as well as cubanite and magnetite. The colour and texture differences between the upper and lower zone of the SIC is caused by the different rates of cooling after the impact. (Spray, Thompson 1996). [20], The Vermillion Mine, which was the first in the Basin to be exploited, was the site at which Frank Sperry (a chemist of the Canadian Copper Company) made the first identification in 1889 of the arsenide of platinum which bears his name. New field, petrographic, and in situ geochemical data document an array of igneous features, including vitric shards, bombs, sheet-like intrusions, and peperites, preserved in exquisite textural detail. South Bay Rd., Sudbury, ON, P3E 5P9. The concentrations of Ni and Cu that appear to have been present in the initial impact melt exceed those to be expected in a melt of average Archean-Proterozoic crust. People have been making use of the minerals in Sudbury Basin for thousands of years. The massive comet blasted into the shallow oceans near the continental margins of a primeval supercontinent, known as Nuna, nearly 1.9 billion years ago. Vredefort impact structure The Vredefort impact structure is the largest verified impact structure on Earth. The Sudbury impact layer in the Paleoproterozoic Iron Ranges of Three distinct assemblages are identified within the pseudotachylytes: (a) pre-impact (>1.85 Ga) rock and mineral clasts derived from host lithologies; (b) a syn- to immediately post-impact (1.85 Ga), rapidly cooled, quartz + sanidine + labradorite + phlogopitic biotite matrix assemblage, formed due to crystallization from a melt at 800900C and (c) a post-impact (<1.85 Ga) retrograde assemblage which overprints both clasts and matrices. Shiva crater - Wikipedia The Sudbury Structure is characterized byprominent potential field anomalies. 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. 9 vertical shaft is between 4-5 times higher than the CN Tower! The cryptocrystalline to microcrystalline grain size (<30 m) of the pseudotachylyte matrices and the predominance of orthoclase as the main K-bearing phase, have rendered the rocks particularly susceptible to Ar loss. Lateral collapse and structural uplift in the center worked together to form a crater approximately 200 km in diameter. The basin is not only filled with remnants of melted rock from the surface, but also contains a mixture of volcanic rock fragments. Plain Language Summary Lake Wanapitei (also known as Lake Wahnapitae) occupies a meteorite crater in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Geol. (F. Brunton private correspondence with the author). In the 1960s, half a dozen RCMP officers accidentally drowned in the lake during a training exercise.[2]. 10 ka or less Less than ten thousand years old, and with a diameter of 100 m (330 ft) or more. Back to SUDBURY IMPACT STRUCTUREmain page. 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. A zone of deformation (shatter cones and rock metamorphism) has been documented to 74 km from the SIC. Knowledge awaits. The colour of the rock is not uniform indicating that the carbon is not uniformly distributed. It is the third-largest known impact crater or astrobleme on Earth, as well as one of the oldest. Coordinates: 4645N 8045W Lake Wanapitei (also known as Lake Wahnapitae) occupies a meteorite crater in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. In the meantime, water from the environment and the heat from the newly exposed rocks can combine to form hydrothermal systems in the heavily fractured rocks in and around the crater. [2] Aorounga km 8. Research shows comet as cause of Sudbury crater. Some of the islands are unpopulated, although a few have recreational cottages located on them. 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. 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=1145432293, This page was last edited on 19 March 2023, at 03:36.
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