Holocene craters

Two Holocene impact craters at Emmerting, Germany: deformation, fracturing, and their relationships to the melting and decarbonization

In two craters near Emmerting, three major processes which variably affected the original pebbles are documented in the following order: 1. Deposition of hot material which solidified to glass (usually thin and transparent) or reacted with carbonate to form expanded “pumice” on the surface of pebbles. 2. Ductile deformation of variable intensity (with limited fragile deformation but intense fracturing of mineral grains), using older as well as newly formed discontinuities; in some cases this deformation is consistent with extreme strain, rendering a human-induced origin highly improbable.

Two impact craters at Emmerting, Germany: field documentation and geophysics

New research of two craters at Emmerting (No. 4 and No. 5), Germany, is presented. This paper should be the first part of two papers concerning presumed impact craters at Emmerting. The second paper will be about mineralogical/petrological, temperature and stress analyses. The enstatite-dominated meteoritic material, found in the crater No. 4 [Procházka et al., 2022; Procházka, 2023], is the subject of a separate detailed research. High-temperature effects and extreme deformation are significant in both craters.