Impact melt sheet thermal modeling
In collaboration with Dr. Gavin G. Kenny (Swedish Museum of Natural History), I created a model to quantifiy how long it takes a melt sheet to cool after an impact event. Gavin visited the Boise State University Isotope Geology Lab to do CA-ID-TIMS U-Pb zircon geochronology on the Morokweng impact melt sheet, South Africa. We decided to build a thermal model in R of conductive cooling to better understand the overlapping high-precision ages. Our thermal model confirms that the melt sheet cools in tens of thousands of years and that it takes over a million years for the lithosphere to return to background geothermal conditions.
Here is an example of our results from the two-dimensional finite difference model. The code is highly flexible and can be easily adapted to simulate thermal perturbations of different shapes and scales.
Check out our paper to learn more:
Kenny, GG, Harrigan, CO, Schmitz, MD, Crowley, JL, Wall, CJ, Andreoli, MAG, Gibson, RL, Maier, WD. 2021. Timescales of impact melt sheet crystallization and the precise age of the Morokweng impact structure, South Africa. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 567: 117013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2021.117013
View the code I developed on Mendeley Data or on GitHub.