The speaker at our June 2021 meeting was Charles Monson from ISGS. Charles recently published on the Glasford Illinois impact structure and its relation to the Ordovician meteor event.
WCBU, a joint service of Bradley University and Illinois State University, interviewed Charles back in November 2019. Their program is online and available for listening. His paper was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
Glasford Meteor May Have Played A Role in Ancient Ice Age
New research on a central Illinois crater suggests possible links to an Ice Age about 455 million years ago.
Charles Monson is an assistant project coordinator with the Illinois State Geological Survey. He said his team's research suggests a ancient meteor about the size of Wrigley Field struck near Glasford, 20 miles southwest of Peoria, creating a 2.5 mile wide crater that's now buried under a more than a thousand feet of sediment.
Scientists look for certain geologic signs like shatter cones (or altered rock) to prove a meteor impact is responsible for a crater, instead of another phenomenon. Monson said no one's taken a good look at the crater since its discovery more than 50 years ago. Using 21st century technology and methods, he said scientists were able to learn more.
"We've documented some of those at the Glasford structure, much more thoroughly than they've been previously documented, so you could say we are the first ones to completely prove this was a meteor impact," he said.
