Recent progress of geophysical exploration in Earth's impact craters

Abstract

Geophysical exploration plays an important role in detecting and studying impact structures. This article reviews the common geophysical features of Earth's impact craters, including their gravity, magnetic, electrical, and seismic characteristics. The most obvious geophysical feature of impact craters is the circular or ring-shaped negative gravity anomaly, which is mainly caused by rock fracture and brecciation resulting in lower rock density. Low magnetic anomalies with complex details are mainly due to impact melting reducing the magnetic susceptibility of rocks inside the crater and post-impact modification resulting in complex detailed features. High electrical conductivity is found in simple craters, while more complex craters have gradually increasing electrical conductivity from the central uplift to the marginal rim. The conductivity is dominated by the fracture extent and water content. Low seismic velocity is mainly due to the lower velocity of fractured breccia and fractures relative to the original rock. In addition, seismic reflection profiling has found that impact structures have distinct concave shapes.Internationally, there are abundant research on the geophysical exploration of impact craters. However, in China, confirmed impact craters are rare in number and lack related geophysical exploration. Summarizing the common geophysical characteristics of impact craters provides a basis for geophysical exploration of potential impact crater regions in China and offers material for popular science and public engagement purposes.There are two confirmed impact craters in China, the Xiuyan crater in Liaoning Province and the Yilan crater in Heilongjiang Province. Active seismic investigations had been conducted in Xiuyan crater, and revealed its relative velocity and attenuation structure. However, although several geological studies have been conducted, a comprehensive geophysical study of the newly discovered Yilan crater is still lacking. Recently, our group has conducted dense seismic nodes and distributed acoustic sensing in Yilan crater, the results of which will be reported in the near future.

Keywords

• impact structure
• gravity anomaly
• magnetic anomaly
• electrical structure
• seismic velocity structure