meteorite crater

crater (def. 2).

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Depression that results from the impact of a meteorite with a solid object in space.

Impact craters have been discovered on Earth, the Moon, Mars, other planets and satellites, and asteroids; they probably occur on unprotected surfaces of similar bodies throughout the universe. Impact craters are much less common on Earth than on the Moon, partly because friction burns up most of the smaller bodies that enter Earth's atmosphere. Thus, any craters formed on Earth's surface tend to be larger than the average size of all entering meteorites.

Meteorite craters on the surface of the Moon, photographed by Lunar Orbiter IV

By courtesy of National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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▪ landform

Introduction

 depression that results from the impact of a natural object from interplanetary space with Earth or with other comparatively large solid bodies such as the Moon, other planets and their satellites, or larger asteroids and comets. For this discussion, the term meteorite crater is considered to be synonymous with impact crater. As such, the colliding objects are not restricted by size to meteorites as they are found on Earth, where the largest known meteorite is a nickel-iron object less than 3 metres (10 feet) across. Rather, they include chunks of solid material of the same nature as comets or asteroids and in a wide range of sizes—from small meteoroids (see meteor and meteoroid) up to comets and asteroids themselves.

      Meteorite crater formation is arguably the most important geologic process in the solar system, as meteorite craters cover most solid-surface bodies, Earth being a notable exception. Meteorite craters can be found not only on rocky surfaces like that of the Moon but also on the surfaces of comets and ice-covered moons of the outer planets. Formation of the solar system left countless pieces of debris in the form of asteroids and comets and their fragments. Gravitational interactions with other objects routinely send this debris on a collision course with planets and their moons. The resulting impact from a piece of debris produces a surface depression many times larger than the original object. Although all meteorite craters are grossly similar, their appearance varies substantially with both size and the body on which they occur. If no other geologic processes have occurred on a planet or moon, its entire surface is covered with craters as a result of the impacts sustained over the past 4.6 billion years since the major bodies of the solar system formed. On the other hand, the absence or sparseness of craters on a body's surface, as is the case for Earth's surface, is an indicator of some other geologic process (e.g., erosion or surface melting) occurring during the body's history that is eliminating the craters.

The impact-cratering process

      When an asteroidal or cometary object strikes a planetary surface, it is traveling typically at several tens of kilometres per second—many times the speed of sound. A collision at such extreme speeds is called a hypervelocity impact. Although the resulting depression may bear some resemblance to the hole that results from throwing a pebble into a sandbox, the physical process that occurs is actually much closer to that of an atomic bomb explosion. A large meteorite impact releases an enormous amount of kinetic energy in a small area over a short time. Planetary scientists' knowledge of the crater-formation process is derived from field studies of nuclear and chemical explosions and of rocket missile impacts, from laboratory simulations of impacts using gun-impelled high-velocity projectiles, from computer models of the sequence of crater formation, and from observations of meteorite craters themselves. A generally accepted model of impact cratering postulates the following sequence of events, which for purposes of illustration refers to a planet as the impacted body.

 Immediately after a meteorite strikes the surface of the planet, shock waves are imparted both to the surface material and to the meteorite itself. As the shock waves expand into the planet and the meteorite, they dissipate energy and form zones of vaporized, melted, and crushed material outward from a point below the planet's surface that is roughly as deep as the meteorite's diameter. The meteorite is usually vaporized completely by the released energy. Within the planet, the expanding shock wave is closely followed by a second wave, called a rarefaction, or release, wave, generated by the reflection of the original wave from the free surface of the planet. The dissipation of these two waves sets up large pressure gradients within the planet. The pressure gradients generate a subsurface flow that projects material upward and outward from the point of impact (see figure—>, diagram A). The material being excavated resembles an outward-slanted curtain moving away from the point of impact.

      The depression that is produced has the form of an upward-facing parabolic bowl about four times as wide as it is deep. The diameter of the crater relative to that of the meteorite depends on several factors, but it is thought for most craters to be about 10 to 1. Excavated material surrounds the crater, causing its rim to be elevated above the surrounding terrain. The height of the rim accounts for about 5 percent of the total crater depth. The excavated material outside the crater is called the ejecta blanket. The elevation of the ejecta blanket is highest at the rim and falls off rapidly with distance.

 When the crater is relatively small, its formation ends when excavation stops. The resulting landform is called a simple crater. The smallest craters require no more than a few seconds to form completely, whereas craters that are tens of kilometres wide probably form in a few minutes.

      As meteorite craters become larger, however, the formation process does not cease with excavation. For such craters the parabolic hole is apparently too large to support itself, and it collapses in a process that generates a variety of features. This collapse process is called the modification stage, and the final depression is known as a complex crater. The modification stage of complex crater formation is poorly understood because the process is mostly beyond current technological capability to model or simulate and because explosion craters on Earth are too small to produce true complex crater landforms. Although conceptually the modification stage is considered to occur after excavation, it may be that collapse begins before excavation is complete. The current state of knowledge of complex crater formation relies primarily on inferences drawn from field observations of Earth's impact structures and spacecraft imagery of impact craters on other solid bodies in the solar system.

  Features associated with complex craters are generally attributed to material moving back toward the point of impact (see figure—>, diagrams B–D). Smaller complex craters have a flat floor caused by a rebound of material below the crater after excavation. This same rebound causes large complex craters to have a central peak; even-larger craters have a raised circular ring within the crater. Analogues to the central peak and ring are the back splash and outward ripple that are seen briefly when a pebble is dropped into water. Also associated with the modification stage is downward faulting, which forms terraces of large blocks of material along the inner rim of the initial cavity. In the case of very large craters, discrete, inward-facing, widely spaced faults called megaterraces form well outside the initial excavation cavity. Craters with megaterraces are called impact basins.

Variations in craters across the solar system

 Although impact craters on all the solid bodies of the solar system are grossly similar, their appearances from body to body can vary dramatically. The most-notable differences are a result of variations among the bodies in surface gravity and crustal properties. A higher surface gravitational acceleration creates a greater pressure difference between the floor of the crater and the surface surrounding the crater. That pressure difference is thought to play a large role in driving the collapse process that forms complex craters, the effect being that the smallest complex craters seen on higher-gravity bodies are smaller than those on lower-gravity bodies. For example, the diameters of the smallest craters with central peaks on the Moon, Mercury, and Venus decrease in inverse proportion to the bodies' surface gravities; Mercury's surface gravity is more than twice that of the Moon, whereas Venus's gravity is more than five times that of the Moon.

      The inherent strength of the impacted surface has an effect similar to that of surface gravity in that it is easier for craters to collapse on bodies with weaker near-surface materials. For example, the presence of water in the near-surface materials of Mars, a condition thought to be likely, would help explain why the smallest complex craters there are smaller than on Mercury, which has a similar surface gravity. Layering in a body's near-surface material in which weak material overlies stronger strata is thought to modify the excavation process and contribute to the presence of craters with flat floors that contain a central pit. Such craters are particularly prominent on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter.

      Observations of the solid planets show clearly that the presence of an atmosphere changes the appearance of impact craters, but details of how the cratering process is altered are poorly understood. Comparison of craters on planets with and without an atmosphere shows no obvious evidence that an atmosphere does more than minimally affect the excavation of the cavity and any subsequent collapse. It does show, however, that an atmosphere strongly affects emplacement of the ejecta blanket. On an airless body the particles of excavated material follow ballistic trajectories. In the presence of an atmosphere most of this material mixes with the atmosphere and creates a surface-hugging fluid flow away from the crater that is analogous to volcanic pyroclastic flow on Earth. On an airless body an ejecta blanket shows a steady decrease in thickness away from the crater, but on a planet with an atmosphere the fluid flow of excavated material lays down a blanket that is relatively constant in thickness away from the crater and that ends abruptly at the outer edge of the flow. The well-preserved ejecta blankets around Venusian craters show this flow emplacement, and field observations of Earth's impact structures indicate that much of their ejecta were emplaced as flows. On Mars most of the ejecta blankets also appear to have been emplaced as flows, but many of these are probably mudflows caused by abundant water near the Martian surface.

Meteorite craters as measures of geologic activity

      A common misconception is that Earth has very few impact craters on its surface because its atmosphere is an effective shield against meteoroids. Earth's atmosphere certainly slows and prevents typical asteroidal fragments up to a few tens of metres across from reaching the surface and forming a true hypervelocity impact crater, but kilometre-scale objects of the kind that created the smallest telescopically visible craters on the Moon are not significantly slowed by Earth's atmosphere (see meteor and meteoroid: Meteorites—meteoroids that survive atmospheric entry (meteor and meteoroid)). The Moon and Earth certainly experienced similar numbers of these larger impact events, but on Earth subsequent geologic processes (e.g., volcanism and plate tectonic (plate tectonics) processes) completely eliminated or severely degraded the craters. The dominant role of erosion as a geologic process that destroys craters is unique to Earth among the solid bodies that have been well-studied. Erosional processes may be important in eliminating craters on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, if methane proves to play the role there that water does in Earth's hydrologic cycle. Elsewhere only volcanic and tectonic processes are capable of eliminating large meteorite craters.

      An absence or sparseness of craters in a given region of a large solid body indicates that relatively recent geologic activity has resurfaced it or otherwise greatly altered its surface appearance. For example, on the Moon the dark mare regions are much less heavily cratered than the light highland areas because the mare were flooded by basaltic volcanic flows about one billion years after formation of the highland areas. From simple counts of the craters larger than a given size per unit area for different regions of a body, it is possible to determine relative surface ages of different regions in order to gain insight into a body's geologic history. For the Moon absolute ages can be assigned to regions with different numbers of craters per unit area because surface samples from several regions were collected during Apollo (Apollo program) lunar landing missions and dated in laboratories on Earth. For other large bodies, assigning absolute ages to given regions based on the number of craters is based on estimates of asteroidal and cometary impact rates, the size range of those objects, and the size of the crater that forms from a given impacting object. Very little data exist as a basis for these estimates, particularly for impact rates. Absolute ages determined for planetary surfaces other than the Moon consequently have large uncertainties relative to the age of the solar system.

Robert R. Herrick

Additional Reading

Overviews of the study of meteorite craters can be found in Bevan M. French, Traces of Catastrophe: A Handbook of Shock-Metamorphic Effects in Terrestrial Meteorite Impact Structures (1998); and Henry J. Melosh, Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process (1989). An overview of the formation of impact basins and their appearance throughout the solar system is Paul D. Spudis, The Geology of Multi-Ring Impact Basins: The Moon and Other Planets (1993). Important collections of scientific papers on impact craters include Burkhard O. Dressler and Virgil L. Sharpton (eds.), Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary Evolution II (1999); and Lawrence T. Silver and Peter H. Schultz (eds.), Geological Implications of Impacts of Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth (1982).

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