Connolly Basin Crater, Gibson desert, Western Australia, Australia
| Latitude & Longitude (WGS84): | 23° 19' 48'' South , 124° 27' 0'' East |
|---|---|
| Latitude & Longitude (decimal): | -23.33000,124.45000 |
| GeoHash: | G#: qgb7rbvsz |
| Locality type: | Crater |
| Köppen climate type: | BWh : Hot deserts climate |
Located 45 kilometres west of Windy Corner, which is the junction between the Gary Highway (a 2 wheel track) and the Talawana Track. The area is extremely remote and travellers need to be well prepared. Help is hundreds of kilometres away. The crater borders the latter track.
Originally thought to be a salt dome, was recognised as a shallow eroded impact crater by Eugene and Caroline Shoemaker in 1985.
The crater is 9 kilometres in diameter, 50 metres depth, with a one kilometre diameter and 5 metre high central uplift area. There is a small playa centre in the crater. The central uplift area is sheared, crushed fine grained sandstone forming a 1 kilometre ring. The interior of the ring is steeply dipping siltstone, and thin bedded fine grained sandstone, in places chaotic, of the early Permian Patterson Formation.
The north-east rim shows gently dipping schist and sandstone of the Samuel Formation early Cretaceous. Ejecta has been entirely removed by erosion. The sandstone in the area is overlain by the Lampe Beds Sandstone Cretaceous to early Tertiary, and this shows in isolated outcrops in a circle surrounding the central uplift area, and is later infill. Sandstone breccia is also exposed in two places near the outcropping Lampe Beds, within the basin, and is also infill. In several places on the basin floor, the Lampe Beds come into contact with laterite, and are heavily Fe.
The crater is not clearly seen on satellite images, and the writer suspects you could easily drive past it.
Map - is approximate only.
No minerals currently recorded for this locality.
Regional Geology
This geological map and associated information on rock units at or nearby to the coordinates given for this locality is based on relatively small scale geological maps provided by various national Geological Surveys. This does not necessarily represent the complete geology at this locality but it gives a background for the region in which it is found.
Click on geological units on the map for more information. Click here to view full-screen map on Macrostrat.org
| Cenozoic 0 - 66 Ma ID: 928046 | sand plain 38499 Age: Cenozoic (0 - 66 Ma) Description: Sand or gravel plains; may include some residual alluvium; quartz sand sheets commonly with ferruginous pisoliths or pebbles; local clay, calcrete, laterite, silcrete, silt, colluvium Comments: regolith; synthesis of multiple published descriptions Lithology: Regolith Reference: Raymond, O.L., Liu, S., Gallagher, R., Zhang, W., Highet, L.M. Surface Geology of Australia 1:1 million scale dataset 2012 edition. Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia). [5] |
| Cretaceous 66 - 145 Ma ID: 3185296 | Mesozoic sedimentary rocks Age: Cretaceous (66 - 145 Ma) Comments: Canning Basin Lithology: Conglomerate,siltstone,shale,sandstone Reference: Chorlton, L.B. Generalized geology of the world: bedrock domains and major faults in GIS format: a small-scale world geology map with an extended geological attribute database. doi: 10.4095/223767. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 5529. [154] |
Data and map coding provided by Macrostrat.org, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
References
