A bevy of craters formed by material blasted from the carving of another, larger crater — a process dubbed secondary cratering — have finally been spotted on Earth. Several groupings of craters in southeastern Wyoming, including dozens of pockmarks in all, have the hallmarks of secondary cratering, researchers report February 11 in GSA Bulletin.
When an asteroid or another type of space rock smacks into a planet or moon, it blasts material from the surface and creates a crater (SN: 12/18/18). Large blocks of that material can be thrown far from the initial crater and blast out their own holes when they land, explains Thomas Kenkmann, a planetary scientist at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Germany. Astronomers have long observed secondary cratering on our moon, Mars and other orbs in the solar system, but never on Earth.
When Kenkmann and his colleagues first investigated a series of craters near Douglas, Wyo., in 2018, they thought the pockmarks were formed by fragments of a large meteorite that had broken up in the atmosphere. But Kenkmann and his team later discovered similar groups of craters of the same age, somewhere around 280 million years old, throughout the region.
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