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Geological research spanning more than a decade found Saskatchewan has one of the rarest kinds of impact craters on Earth.
or comet, generated so much energy that it liquified the Earth’s crust and created rock of a different kind. “Gow Lake has a lot of these very interesting rocks we call impactites,” Osinski said. “Because of the nature of the impact process, the melt-rock, or breccia, we find at Gow Lake make it unique in the world.
You will not find another rock that looks like it anywhere else on Earth.” Since the 1970s, it has been known that the water in Gow Lake fills an impact crater measuring roughly five kilometres across. It was assumed to be a central peak impact structure — a common form of crater, circular in shape, with terraced walls and a peak in the middle. In 2011, a team of researchers lead by Osinski, a planetary geologist at Western, conducted a field study at Gow Lake. TheAdvertisement 4Geological research spanning more than a decade found Saskatchewan has one of the rarest kinds of impact craters on Earth. There is only one other crater in the world — located in Australia — like the one at Gow Lake, and it’s hardly as pristine as the massive hole blown in the northern Saskatchewan landscape by space debris roughly 200 million years ago.A dozen years later — the blink of an eye in geological time — the team’s findings were. They show that the Gow Lake crater is far from typical and is actually a transitional impact structure, of which there are only two on Earth. “Being rare on Earth is one of the significant things about this crater,” Osinski said. “I would say it is the only actual example we have of this type of crater. The only other crater of its kind, in Australia, is quite eroded and there’s very little information left.”covered by debris fallen from the crater walls. It is a transitional form between a simple bowl-shaped crater and a complex crater with a central uplift.Article content Osinski said the 2011 expedition to Gow Lake, enabled by a float plane and the use of canoes, turned up exceptional rocks that held evidence of a cataclysmic event. “That projectile hits the surface of the Earth, penetrates somewhat and is essentially vaporized,” he said. “It’s all about kinetic energy. That thing is coming in staggeringly fast, 15 to 20 kilometres per second, with a huge amount of energy. That energy is left over as heat that can literally melt cubic kilometres of the Earth’s crust, instantly. The surrounding rock looks like volcanic rock.” The asteroid or comet itself would have been small compared to the size of the crater — one-10th or one-20th the size. “We know of about 200 meteorite impact craters on Earth, but many of them are buried, submerged or eroded to such a degree that there’s hardly anything left to study,” said Osinski.Article content That is not the case with Gow Lake. The Earth’s crust sustained a severe blow there, leaving a crater rich in detail for future researchers to study.Canada is also home to one of the only human-inhabited impact craters in the world. The city of Greater Sudbury, a hotbed of nickel mining, is situated in the Sudbury Basin, a crater 130 kilometres in diameter dating back 1.8 billion years.
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