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Australian crater-forming meteorites

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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Meteorites are associated with five impact structures in Australia. Three of them are group IIIAB irons (Wolf Creek, Henbury, and Boxhole), Veevers is a group IIAB iron, and material recovered from the crater at Dalgaranga is a mesosiderite stony-iron. The impacts range in age from a few thousand years (Dalgaranga, Henbury, Veevers, and Boxhole) to 300,000 years (Wolfe Creek Crater). Metallographic studies of the surviving fragments at some of the craters show that impact damage ranges from simple fracturing, through shock-hardening of metal, to plastic and shear deformation, reheating and attendant recrystallisation, and, ultimately, melting. Details of the microstructures of surviving fragments of iron meteorite from the craters suggest that shear deformation may have been an important mechanism in the disruption of the projectiles. Frictional heating from viscous drag between projectile and target, and from rapid shear deformation within the projectile, may be sufficient to melt and vaporise significant portions of the projectiles and account for the large deficit of meteoritic material from Australian impact craters.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Australian crater-forming meteorites
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/72550388-ba21-474e-bd13-02259512bc09
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 20/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage Australia
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Australian crater-forming meteorites". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/australian-crater-forming-meteorites