Numerical modeling of an impact‐induced hydrothermal system at the Sudbury crater
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large impact events, like the one that formed the Sudbury crater in Ontario, Canada, at 1.85 Ga, significantly increase the temperature of target rocks. The heat sources generated by such an impact event can drive the circulation of groundwater, establishing a hydrothermal system. We report on the results of numerical modeling of postimpact cooling with and without the presence of water at the Sudbury crater. A hydrothermal system is initiated in the annular trough between the peak ring and final crater rim, perhaps venting through faults that bound blocks of the crust in the modification zone of the crater. Although circulation through the overlying breccias may occur in the center of the crater, the central melt sheet is initially impermeable to circulating fluids. By ∼105 years the central melt sheet crystallizes and partially cools, allowing fluids to flow through it. Host rock permeability is the main factor affecting fluid circulation and lifetimes of hydrothermal systems. High permeabilities lead to a rapid system cooling, while lower permeabilities allow a steady transport of hot fluids to the surface, resulting in high surface temperatures for longer periods of time than cooling by conduction alone. The simulations presented in this paper show that a hydrothermal system at a Sudbury‐sized impact crater can remain active for several hundred thousand to several million years, depending on assumed permeability. These results suggest that a hydrothermal system induced by an impact event can remain active for sufficiently long periods of time to be biologically significant, supporting the idea that impact events may have played an important biological role, especially early in Earth's history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".