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NWT crater to be investigated

A researcher will be flying to a remote NWT lake, near the Nunavut border, to investigate the crater left behind by an asteroid 389 million years ago.

photo courtesy David Stonehouse/University of New Brunswick
Graduate student Maree McGregor will be spending several weeks at a remote NWT crater, at Nicholson Lake, to gather research on asteroid impacts.

University of New Brunswick graduate student Maree McGregor will fly by floatplane to Nicholson Lake from Flin Flon, Man., stopping at a fishing lodge on Mosquito Lake before arriving at Nicholson Lake, which will be her home for three weeks.

“(We’re) trying to be minimal,” says McGregor, “obviously being prepared for the weather and food-wise.

“Also, probably trying to get access to a gun licence,” she said with a laugh, noting she hopes not to have to use it, but it’ll be her first time in grizzly bear country.

While plans are still being finalized, she will be joined by at least one other person while collecting data around the lake by foot, canoe and Zodiac to get an idea of the extent of the crater and ascertain what its remnants say about the effect such impacts have on the land.

“We’re just really trying to obtain as much information as we can structurally to how the crater is because no detailed mapping has been done before,” says McGregor, “and also, analyzing the samples to find out what sort of shock features are in there and how that relates to the impact cratering process.”

This research is part of a bigger project McGregor is working on, for her PhD thesis, dating impact craters to get an idea of how often such impacts happen – data that could help us mitigate future asteroid strikes. McGregor, herself, was the one who pinpointed the date of the Nicholson strike.

“I’ve been doing a lot of geological dating, dating several impact craters with Nicholson being one of them, because a lot of them aren’t well constrained (into a specific date) so we don’t know how often impact events do happen, though we do know that it’s considerably less compared to early on in the solar system.”

McGregor’s trip is funded through the Shoemaker Impact Cratering Award, a prestigious international endowment in the field of planetary geology.

“It has not been visited since the 1960s and no studies have been undertaken since,” she stated in a release sent out by her university. “There are many intriguing geological features, including impact melts and rare and unusual shock-modified minerals.”