After years of research, an East County teen has perhaps accomplished a first identifying an ancient meteorite crater in California. Sam Spevack, a Grossmont Middle College High School senior, found what scientists believe is a possible crater near Stockton that was created by a meteorite hitting the Earth millions of years ago.
A space rock the size of three football fields may have slammed into California more than 35 million years ago, according to a team of scientists that includes a high school student. The proposed impact may have created the giant 5.5-kilometer-wide craterlike formation that the team found buried 1,490 to 1,600 meters below sea level west of Stockton, California.
Researchers in San Joaquin County, California have discovered what appears to be a massive impact crater made by an asteroid nearly 50 million years ago, while exploring the area for possible oil deposits. The period in which it struck the Earth, say researchers, is called the Eocene Epoch. Images from a seismic survey has shown the crater is about 6 kilometres wide, buried under sediment at nearly 4,300 feet and may even still contain the asteroid which is said to still be inside the crater nearly 10 miles below the Earth's surface. The crater is reported to be below an area previously covered by water.
Title: 3D Seismic and the Discovery of California's First Meteorite Impact Crater, Sacramento Valley Authors: S. C. Spevack, J. R. Morrow, and B. Z. Spevack,
Analyses of a 3-D seismic survey and well logs in the southwestern Sacramento basin, San Joaquin County, California, have revealed a subsurface, circular, ~5.5-km-diameter anomaly that may represent a previously unrecognised complex impact crater (Figs. 1–3). This unique anomaly, buried 1,490–1,600 m below sea level under the southwestern part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, is provisionally named the Victoria Island structure for an overlying surface geographic feature.
Oil exploration work in California's Central Valley region has uncovered a possible space impact crater. The 5.5km-wide bowl is buried under shale sediments west of Stockton, in San Joaquin County, and is thought to be between 37 and 49 million years old. Researchers are continuing to analyse cuttings from oil exploration wells drilled in the structure. Details of the discovery were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.
Victoria Island is not the first crater proposed for the Central Valley. A 1.3km-wide (0.8 miles) feature to the north known as the Cowell structure, dating to the Miocene (5 to 24 million years ago), has also been put forward as the location of a space impact.