Can Archean Impact Structures Be Discovered? A Case Study From Earth's Largest, Most Deeply Eroded Impact Structure

The record of terrestrial impact events is incomplete with no Archean impact structures discovered, despite the expected abundance of collisions that must have occurred. Because no Archean impact structures have been identified, the necessary conditions to preserve an impact structure longer than 2 Byr are unknown. One significant effect of shock metamorphism is that the physical properties of the target rocks change, resulting in distinctive geophysical signatures of impact structures. To evaluate the preservation potential of impact structures, we evaluate the deeply eroded Proterozoic Vredefort impact structure to examine the changes in physical properties and the remnant of the geophysical signature and compare the results with the well‐preserved Chicxulub impact structure. The major structural features of Vredefort are similar to the expected profile of the Chicxulub structure at a depth of 8–10 km. The Vredefort target rocks, while shocked, do not preserve measurable changes in their physical properties. The gravity signature of the impact structure is minor and is controlled by the remnant of the collapsed transient crater rim and the uplifted Moho surface. We anticipate that erosion of the Vredefort structure by an additional 1 km would remove evidence of impact, and regardless of initial size, erosion by >10 km would result in the removal of most of the evidence for any impact structure from the geological record. This study demonstrates that the identification of geologically old (i.e., Archean) impact structures is limited by a lack of geophysical signatures associated with deeply eroded craters. Plain Language Summary Meteorite collisions should have formed throughout the 4.5 billion‐year‐long history of Earth, but we have only found impact craters that are less than half of the age of the Earth (2 billion years) and younger. In order to understand how to find very old impact craters, we studied the largest of the oldest preserved impact craters. The 2 Byr old Vredefort structure in South Africa has been deeply eroded, and thus provides a good view of its deep roots. We collected a series of samples of the exposed rocks known to have evidence of shock effects and measured their physical properties. We found that the physical properties do not show evidence of the meteorite impact event. We also established that the gravity profile of the crater preserves a weak signal. When the Vredefort structure erodes a bit more, the geophysical characterist