Burkhard O. Dressler

New constraints on the Slate Islands impact structure, Ontario, Canada

The Slate Islands in northern Lake Superior represent the eroded remains of a complex impact crater, originally approximately 32 km in diameter. New field studies there reveal allogenic crater fill deposits along the eastern and northern portions of the islands indicating that this 500-800 Ma impact structure is not as heavily eroded as previously thought. Near the crater center, on the western side or Patterson Island, massive blocks of target rocks, enclosed within a matrix of fine-grained polymict breccia, record the extensive deformation associated with the central uplift. Shatter cones are a common structural feature on the islands and range from less than 3 cm to over 10 m in length. Although shatter cones are powerful tools for recognizing and analyzing eroded impact craters, their origin remains poorly constrained.

Slate Islands, Lake Superior, Canada: A mid-size, Complex Impact Structure

The target rocks of the 30-32-km diameter Slate Islands impact structure in northern Lake Superior, Canada, are Archean supracrustal and igneous rocks and supracrustal Proterozoic rocks. Shatter cones, pseudotachylites, impact glasses, and microscopic shock metamorphic features were formed during the contact and compression phase of the impact process, followed, during excavation and central uplift, by polymict, clastic matrix breccias in the uplifted target, and by allogenic fall-back breccias (suevite and bunte breccia). Monomict, autoclastic breccias were mainly observed on Mortimer Island and the other outlying islands of the archipelago and were probably generated relatively late in the impact process (central uplift and/or crater modification). The frequency of low index planar shock metamorphic features in quartz was correlated with results from shock experiments to estimate shock pressures experienced by the target rocks. The resulting shock attenuation plan across the archipelago is irregular, probably because the shock wave did not expand from a point or spherical source, and because of the destruction of an originally more regular shock attenuation plan during the central uplift and crater modification stages of the impact process. No impact melt rock bodies have been positively identified on the islands. An impact melt may be present in the annular trough around the islands, though and-based on a weighted mixture of target rocks-may have an intermediate-mafic composition. No such impact melt was found on the archipelago. An Ar-40-Ar-39 release spectrum of a pseudotachylite provides an age of about 436 Ma for the impact structure, substantiating age constraints based on various stratigraphic considerations.