A day after I visited
Meteor Crater,
I went to another confirmed impact site.
Upheaval Dome is located in Canyonlands National Park in the
Island in the Sky section of the park.
It's near the town of Moab in eastern Utah near the Colorado border.
Except for the fact that they're among the few confirmed impacts in the
western states, Upheaval Dome is otherwise very different from Meteor Crater.
For starters, Upheaval Dome's 5km diameter makes it 5 times as wide as
Meteor Crater.
Also, Upheaval Dome very old and severely eroded.
So it's called an impact structure - everything that would
make it obviously look like a crater is gone.
What we see today is remnant rocks that used to be below the crater floor.
But they still tell a story of a dramatic event.
While most of Canyonlands National Park's rock formations are in level
horizontal layers, at Upheaval Dome they turn up and down at the rim,
uplift rings and the central uplift.
The National Park Service has been slow to update their documentation
about it. The impact origin has been proven beyond any scientific
doubt from the discovery of impact-shocked minerals in the rocks.
The original geological theory still appearing in some NPS materials
was that it was an effect of a salt
dome rising beneath it, and rocks eroded away above.
You can see the outdated presentation on
Canyonlands
page about Upheaval Dome.
Rest assured, other sources besides the National Park Service are up-to-date.
University of New Brunswick's Earth Impact Database
lists
Upheaval Dome as a confirmed impact site.
And that's saying something - UNB has a reputation for being very picky
about the level of proof required before listing a site.
By the time they list a site, the impact origin and quality of documentation
have been established beyond scientific doubt for some time.
I could have used better sunlight. But with high clouds arriving a couple
days in advance of an incoming snowstorm, I took what I could get.
All pages and images on this site are copyright (c) Ian Kluft
unless explicitly indicated otherwise.
Permission is required to use my images, and usually available if you ask first.
A day after I visited