Sudbury Basin - Disputes Over Origin

Disputes Over Origin

Even as late as the mid-1970s, geologists were not fully certain of the Sudbury basin having meteor origins. The educational television programme Planet of Man—created for Canadian universities to use in introductory geology classes—mooted the possible volcanic origins of the Sudbury geological structures.

Considering how old the evidence is for a meteor impact, some 1.8 billions of years of weathering and other geological processes made it difficult to prove with 1970s era technology that a meteor was the cause of the Sudbury geological structures. Since then an ash and conglomerate layer has been found associated with the impact event and stressed rock formations have been fully mapped.

The cause of the ongoing difficulty with proof of the meteor event was that the region was volcanically active around the same time as the impact—and some weathered volcanic structures can look like meteor collision structures given the right conditions.