The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is funding OU scientists to study the role of large asteroid impacts on Earth.
Not only are asteroid impacts implicated in mass extinctions, they form traps for oil and gas, and in the early history of the Earth and Mars, they may have been important habitats for life. A new Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)-funded research project will focus on an impact crater in the Ukraine.
In the last 25 years, scientists have come to understand the potential importance of asteroid impacts on the Earth and other planets in the solar system. They are implicated in mass extinctions, in the formation of traps for oil and gas, and in the early history of the Earth and Mars they may have been important habitats for life. The project, which involves Open University CEPSAR scientists Simon Kelley, Iain Gilmour, Jon Watson and David Jolley (University of Aberdeen), was launched in 2006 to investigate in detail the Boltysh meteorite impact crater in the Ukraine.
The crater was formed in a very shallow sea on a flat continental shelf sixty five million years ago, at the same time as the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, though it has not been possible to determine whether the two happened at exactly the same time. After the impact, the crater was quickly filled with a freshwater lake. Over the next fifteen million years the lake filled with fine sediment and the organic remains of the flora and fauna which lived in the lake, or were washed in by rivers. The fact that Boltysh remained a hole in the ground on the flat continental shelf means that it holds a unique and near continuous record of the KT boundary (between the age of dinosaurs and the age of mammals) and early Paleogene period. This project will drill two holes and recover cored sediments from the crater floor up to the point when the sea invaded the crater around 50 million years ago.
