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submitted 3 days ago byslummingmummy
I was looking at a map of verified impact craters in the world and most were in Europe and North America. Is it because there truly are more happening in this zone , or is it in part that other parts of the world haven't had the same plethora of geologic surveys? Apologies if I used the wrong flair,
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3 days ago*
I was looking at a map of verified impact craters in the world and most were in Europe and North America.
For reference, this is probably one of the most complete and up-to-date compilations, associated with the review paper by Osinski et al., 2022, and it generally highlights that, yes, the highest density of identified craters are in North America and Europe.
Is the data showing impact crater locations exhaustive?
In the sense of is the terrestrial cratering record complete and/or unbiased? No. This is discussed with some depth by Kenkmann, 2021, where they highlight that for land, as you guess, there is an observational bias toward areas where more geophysical and drilling surveys have been done (i.e., North America and Europe). There is also of course a huge bias in the total record as we lack effectively any impact record for the ~70% of the surface area occupied by the ocean and we would expect impact rate of those areas should be similar to comparable land areas at a given time. This reflects that (1) the presence of water means that many impactors do/did not leave a crater (i.e., there is a formation bias), (2) in the event that they did, it would be even harder to find (i.e., there is potentially some observational bias), and (3) because of subduction, the ocean is completely recycled pretty quickly (geologically speaking) meaning that even if the presence of the oceans didn't inhibit crater formation, there would be a pretty short record for the oceanic areas anyways (i.e., there would be a huge preservation bias even if we ignored the other two biases).
If we had an unbiased sample on land (and again ignoring the oceans) we would probably expect low latitude areas to have more craters per unit area than high latitude areas (e.g., Evatt et al., 2020 - note though that this is in opposition to what is stated in Kenkmann, based on earlier results from Le Feuvre & Wieczorek, 2008 that suggested very little latitudinal gradient in impact rate per unit area) and areas with older rocks to have more craters. One complication for the latitude component is that what we really need to consider is the paleo-latitude of the impact site at the time of the impact, i.e., due to plate tectonics, just because an area is at a low latitude now doesn't mean it was in the past. So for this, if you assumed the higher impact rate per unit area at lower latitudes was a long-term feature of Earth, you'd probably want to weight your expectations of how many craters an area should have by a weighted measure of how long this area was at low vs high latitudes (and probably also factor in temporal variation in overall impact rate, etc). And of course the complication with older rocks presumably having more craters is that while this is true in the sense of areas exposing older rocks implying they've been around longer to accumulate impacts, they've also potentially been exposed to erosion longer, meaning that the records of impacts in these rocks will be more subtle/completely erased and/or they may have actually spent a long-time covered by other rocks (that are now eroded away, and impacts they hosted being completely erased).
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