Crooked Creek - Hypervelocity Impact Crater

Alternate Names
Local Language
Coordinates 37° 50' 8" N; 91° 23' 41" W
Notes
  1. Crawford County, Missouri, high on the NW slope of the Ozark Plateau, 50 km W of the St. Francois Mountains.
Country United States of America
Region Missouri
Date Confirmed 1954
Notes
  1. Abundant shatter cones and PDF's found in quartz (Hendricks, 1954).
Buried? No
Notes
  1. Only the extreme E side of the disturbance is covered with Quaternary alluvium. Most of the structure's Ordovician and Cambrian strata is exposed (Kilsgaard et al., 1962).
Drilled? No
Target Type Sedimentary
Notes
  1. Cambrian and Ordovician sandstones and dolomites (Hendriks, 1965).
Sub-Type Dolomite, Sandstone
Apparent Crater Diameter (km) 7 km
Age (Ma) 323 - 485
Notes :
  1. 323-485 Ma determined by stratigraphic constraints (post-Jefferson City and pre-Pennsylvanian) (Snyder and Gerdemann, 1965). Additional age constraints: The disturbance affects Ordovician and Cambrian strata and is overlain in places by undisturbed Pennsylvanian strata. It was most likely a mid-Proterozoic deformation event around 320 ± 80 Ma (Hendriks, 1965). It occured sometime between Lower Ordovician and Pennsylvanian (323-470 Ma; between the Jefferson City Formation, which is the youngest affected rocks, and the regionally overlying Cherokee Formation). (Hendriks, 1949) claims the Jefferson City Formation to be Canadian in age and the Cherokee Formation to be Des Moines in age (Hendriks, 1949).

Method :
  1. Stratigraphy
Impactor Type Unknown

Advanced Data Fields

Notes

Erosion
6
  1. The floor is exposed in the central uplift; only remnants of the crater-fill remains (Grieve, 1982).
Final Rim Diameter
Unknown
Apparent Rim Diameter
7 km
  1. (Hendriks, 1965).
Rim Reliability Index
2
  1. Stratigraphic uplift: 0.40 km from table 2 in (Grieve et al., 1981), details are from (Fox, 1954) and (Kiilsgaard et al., 1963).
Crater Morphology
Complex
Central Uplift Diameter
2.2km
Central Uplift Height
Unknown
Uplift Reliability Index
Structural Uplift
400 m
Thickness of Seds
Target Age
Palaeozoic
Marine
No
Impactor Type
Other Shock Metamorphism
No
Shatter Cones
Yes
  1. Shatter cones were first recognized by (Hendriks, 1949) (Hendriks, 1954) (Hendriks, 1965) then a few investigations on Sc were performed by (Dietz, 1959) (Dietz, 1960) (Kiilsgaard et al., 1962) (Amstutz, 1965a) (Amstutz, 1965b) and (Dietz, 1968). Shatter cones are known to occur only in the central basin and are apparently restricted to Potosi dolomite. The shatter cones of the Crooked Creek structure range from about one inch in height and bassal diameter to nearly three inches in height and diameter (Hendriks, 1954). Central zone contains abundant shatter cones (Snyder and Gerdemann, 1965). Shatter cones are abundant in the central expsure of Potosi dolomite (Snyder and Gerdemann, 1965).
Planar Fractures
No
Planar Deformation Features
Yes
  1. PDF in quartz grains (Dietz and Lambert, 1980).
Diaplectic Glass
No
Coesite
No
Stisovite
No
Crater Fill
LB
  1. LB from (Kiilsgaard et al., 1963). The melt portion is supposedly carbonate. Could not access (Kiilsgaard et al., 1963).
Proximal Ejecta
Distal Ejecta
Dykes
Volume of Melt
Depth of Melting

References

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H E Hendriks (1954) The geology of the Steelville Quadrangle, Missouri, Missouri Geological Survey and Water Resources 36, p. 88, url

J H Fox, V T Allen, R R Heinrich (1954) Crooked Creek "cryptovolcanic" structure, Steelville, Missouri, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 65(12, Part 2), p. 1252-1253, Geological Society of America (GSA), Boulder, CO, url

T H Kiilsgaard, A V Heyl, M R Brock (1963) The Crooked Creek disturbance, Southeast Missouri, U. S. Geological Survey Professional Paper, p. E14-E19, U. S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA, url

H E Hendriks (1965) The Crooked Creek structure, Report of Investigations - Missouri Geological Survey and Water Resources 36, p. 68-72, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geology and Land Survey, Geological Survey, Rolla, MO, url

G C Amstutz (1965) A morphological comparison of diagenetic cone-in-cone structures and shatter cones, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 123(2), p. 1050-1056, Wiley/Blackwell (10.1111), url, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1965.tb20416.x

G C Amstutz (1965) Tectonic and petrographic observations on polygonal structures in Missouri, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 123(2), p. 876-894, Wiley/Blackwell (10.1111), url, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1965.tb20406.x

F G Snyder, P E Gerdemann (1965) Explosive igneous activity along an Illinois-Missouri-Kansas axis, American Journal of Science 263(6), p. 465-493, Kline Geology Laboratory, Yale University, New Haven, CT, url

F G Snyder, P E Gerdemann, H E Hendriks, J H Williams, G Wallace, J A Martin (1965) Cryptoexplosive structures in Missouri: Guidebook, 1965 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America: Geological Survey and Water Resources Report of Investigations(30), p. 73

J H Fox (1970) The geophysical signature associated with a cryptoexplosion structure, Bell Comm.

J H Fox (1970) Geophysical investigation of the Crooked Creek, Missouri, crypto-explosion structure, Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 51(11), p. 770, American Geophysical Union, Washington, DC, url

M H McCracken (1971) Structural features of Missouri, Report of Investigations - Missouri Geological Survey and Water Resources 49, p. 77, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geology and Land Survey, Geological Survey, Rolla, MO, url

Robert S Dietz, P Lambert (1980) Shock metamorphism at Crooked Creek cryptoexplosion structure, Mo., Meteoritics 15(4), Carleton B Moore (ed.), p. 281-282, Arizona State University, Center for Meteorite Studies, Tempe, AZ, url

R A F Grieve (1982) The record of impact on Earth: Implications for a major Cretaceous/Tertiary impact event, Geological Society of America 190(Special Paper), p. 25-37, url

E P Gurov, E P Gurova (1987) Impact structures on the Earth's surface, Geologicheskiy Zhurnal 2599442, p. 13, url

V L Masaitis (1991) The deep structure of impact craters, Razvedka i okhrana nedr 8, p. 10-13

T Kenkmann (2001) Deformation mechanisms during impact crater modification inferred from the Crooked Creek impact structure, Missouri, USA, Abstracts of Papers Submitted to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 32, p. Abstract no. 1560, Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Houston, TX, url

G A J Nickerson, J G Spray, L A Mayer (2001) Investigation of integrated geologic and geophysical data using GIS; Crooked Creek and Decaturville impact structures, Missouri, Atlantic Geology 36(1), p. 67-68, Atlantic Geoscience Society, Fredericton, NB, url

T Kenkmann (2002) Folding within seconds, Geology (Boulder) 30(3), p. 231-234, Geological Society of America (GSA), Boulder, CO, url