https://earthobservatory.nasa.

gov/images/92689/vredefort-crater

Vredefort Crater

June 27, 2018 JPEG

Today’s story is the answer to the August 2018 puzzler.

About two billion years ago, an asteroid measuring at least 10 kilometers across
hurtled toward Earth. The impact occurred southwest of what is now
Johannesburg, South Africa, and temporarily made a 40-kilometer-deep and
100-kilometer-wide dent in the surface. Almost immediately after impact, the
crater widened and shallowed as the rock below started to rebound and the
walls collapsed. The world’s oldest and largest known impact structure was
formed.

Scientists estimate that when the rebound and collapse ceased, Vredefort
Crater measured somewhere between 180 and 300 kilometers wide. But more
than 2 billion years of erosion has made the exact size hard to pin down.

“If you consider that the original impact crater was a shallow bowl like you would
serve food in, and you were able to slice horizontally through the bowl
progressively, you would see that the bowl’s diameter will decrease with each
slice you take off,” said Roger Gibson of University of the Witwatersrand and an
expert on impact processes. “For this reason, we are unable to categorically fix
where the edge now lies.”

According to Gibson, the uplift at the center of the impact was so strong that a
25-kilometer section of Earth’s crust was turned on end. The various layers of
upturned rock eroded at different rates and produced the concentric pattern still
visible today. Vredefort Dome, which measures about 90 kilometers across, was
observed on June 27, 2018, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat
8.

Notice that only part of the ring is visible. That’s because areas to the south
have been paved over by rock formations that are less than 300 million years
old. The young rock formations have begotten fertile soils that are intensely
cultivated.

The darker ring in the center of this image, known as the Vredefort
Mountainland, has shallow soils with steep terrain not suitable for farming, so
the area remains naturally forested. Along the ridges in the Mountainland you
can see white lines: these are the hardest layers of rock, such as quartzite,
which resist erosion. The outer part of Mountainland has exposed rocks that are
roughly 2.8 billion years old; this is the Central Rand Group, source of more
than one-third of all gold mined on Earth.
Visitors to the impact site today can witness geologic time by traversing just 50
kilometers from Potchefstroom toward Vredefort. The journey would take you
from shallow crustal sedimentary rocks deposited between 2.5 and 2.1 billion
years ago, ending with 3.1- to 3.5-billion-year-old granites and remnants of
ocean crust that were once about 25 kilometers below Earth’s surface.

“Such exposed crustal sections are incredibly rare on Earth,” Gibson said. “The
added bonus here is that the rocks preserve an almost continuous record
spanning almost one-third of Earth’s history.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from
the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Image of the Day Land Human Presence

View this area in EO Explorer

The world’s oldest and largest known impact structure shows some of
the most extreme deformation conditions known on Earth.
 Image of the Day for September 1, 2018

Instrument:
Landsat 8 — OLI

View more Images of the Day:

Aug 31, 2018 Sep 2, 2018

References & Resources

Gibson, R.L and Reimold, W.U. (2010) Geology of the Vredefort impact structure:
A guide to sites of interest. The Meteoritical Society, 2009.

Turtle, E.P. and Pierazzo, E. (1998) Constraints on the size of the Vredefort
impact crater from numerical modeling. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 33
(2), 483–490.

United Nations World Heritage Convention (2018) Vredefort Dome. Accessed

August 31, 2018.