On the detection of the Wilkes Land impact crater

Abstract

The definitive existence of a giant impact crater, two times larger than the Chixulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, from an extraterrestrial origin, 1.6 km beneath Wilkes Land, East Antarctica, remain controversial. Here, we use the latest high-resolution gravito-topographic geopotential (SatGravRET 2014) model over Antarctica to offer a plausible confirmation of its existence. SatGravRET 2014 has a spatial resolution between 1 and 10 km at most places and included contemporary space gravimetry and gradiometry data from GRACE and GOCE, and other data including Bedmap 2 bedrock topography. We computed the gravity disturbances, the Marussi tensor of the second derivatives of the disturbing potential, the gravity invariants and their specific ratio, the strike angles and the virtual deformations to quantify the detailed geophysical features for the Wilkes Land anomaly. This set of the gravitational parameters revealed enhanced and more detailed geophysical features on the Wilkes Land Crater than previously possible only with the traditional gravity anomalies. Our findings support prior studies stating that in the Wilkes Land there is a huge impact crater/basin with detectable gravity mascon which is mostly consistent with the characteristics of an impact crater. which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

A 200 km suspected impact crater Kotuykanskaya near Popigai, Siberia, in the light of new gravity aspects from EIGEN 6C4, and other data

“…complete review of the theory (with examples) is in [5][6][7] . The examples devoted to the impact craters can be found in 5,[8][9][10] and cannot be repeated here owing to space reasons and selfplagiarism; thus, an extensive Supplement (with theory and examples) is added.…”

“…In the literature, many examples of the local use of usual gravity aspects (mostly Δg, sometimes T ij , seldom I 1 and I 2 or θ) can be found (see, e.g 3,11-13 .). Our methodology and various results covering different parts of the world can be found in 4,[6][7][8][9][14][15][16] . The values of all the gravity aspects were obtained by using the software by B. Bucha 17 Data.…”