Director's Message

Cooleagues (phone typo!),

Greetings from Sulawesi, where the College of Science and School are pursuing our Future Research Talent ambitions, a program recently set up with leading institutions in India, whereby top Masters level students are supported to visit the ANU for up to 3 months.

I am visiting UNHAS in Makassar, the leading University in eastern Indonesia, and tomorrow I head to Jakarta to meet with ITB and LIPI representatives. The School is specifically seeking to develop 1+1 articulated masters programs funded by DFAT and Indonesian Ministries, particulary in the areas of geohazards and meeting Indonesia's resource challenges.  

Before getting on with the day and week, I'd like to congratulate Ilya and Jochen for their stunning work published in Science last week. 

Best regards,

Steve 

“Asteroids and crustal evolution – synopsis of a new book”

Thanks to their long-term geological stability, Precambrian and younger terrains in the Australian continent contain a large number of impact structures and probable impact structures. These include 38 confirmed asteroid impact structures and 43 ring structures, many of which constitute possible to probable asteroid impact structures. These structures have been the subject of more than half a century of studies by geologists from universities, geological surveys, and related institutions. The structures range from several tens of meter-large craters, such as the Henbury and Veevers craters, to buried structures larger than 100 km in diameter, such as the Woodleigh impact structure and the Warburton probable impact structure. Discoveries and research of many of these structures, notably by Peter Haines, Eugene and Caroline Shoemaker, John Gorter, Robert Iasky, Victor Gostin, George Williams, and others, published in the literature, are reviewed in the book “Asteroid Impacts, Crustal Evolution, and Mineral Systems with Reference to Australia.”

The book presents a compilation and a review of Australian impact structures, impact ejecta/fallout deposits, and related mineralization, including discussion of the significance of many of these structures for crustal evolution and for mineralization. The book further reviews asteroid impact ejecta/fallout units, mainly of Archaean age studied in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia and also the late Proterozoic Bunyeroo impact layer in South Australia. Discoveries of impact fallout units in the Pilbara Craton by the US scientists, including Bruce Simonson, Scott Hassler, Don Lowe, and Gary Byerly, and their students and follow-up discoveries and research by Australian geologists have defined the Pilbara as one of the two best documented terrains where Archaean impact ejecta/fallout deposits are identified, the other terrain being the Kaapvaal Craton in southern Africa. A synthesis of evidence from both cratons indicates periods of large asteroid bombardments during ~3.47–2.48 billion years ago, including peak bombardment about 3.25–3.22 billion years ago.

Andrew Glikson

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