Oil & Gas in Craters - Goodspeed's History of TN reports an early fascination with rocks that burned in Middle, TN. Oil slate was mined on Slate Rock Mill Rd. in Lincoln County. From 1900 throught the 1930's there was a small oil & gas boom in Lincoln County. While there are a couple of oil productive craters in the United States Middle TN is conspicuous by it's absence. This is because the Middle TN basin is a large crater structure with subsequent craters. The many wiping unconformities testify to that fact. These interruptions limited the formation of oil & gas but caused uranium, phosphate, lead, zinc, iron, marble, high grade crushed stone, glades and the most interesting geology on the planet. The oil and gas skirts the basin crater due to interrupted formation.
The story of the Howell (actually centered at Frankewing, TN) crater and oil & gas are intertwined. John Wilson Young Jr. studied at Vanderbilt and the University of TN to be a dentist and minored in geology his real love. He practiced dentistry for a few years then rode the Lincoln County oil & gas boom from beginning to end. He noted the minerals of Lincoln County and reported the crater formed lead veins south of Fayetteville. And finally before dying he got the impact crater work started at Howell reporting it to the state geologist. While a crater over a greater crater is not the best place for a long lived oil & gas boom the Howell impact he discovered and reported is the most unique geologic physics structure on the planet. The remarkable phenomena found here exist nowhere else. The obliqueness of the impact suggest it could have changed the earth's day and been a planet that hit and skipped off. The impact relics are profound as well.
If you consider the large area around Chernobyl that is radioactive contaminated and the stunted plants, this is an anti carboniferous effect. You can see it in the map below also on a macro scale. These interstellar bolides can be radioactive from collecting generational exploding star debris. While declining to radon in the present the effect was counter organic after impact. Also craters this big blast down to a hard strata rock basin which takes a long time to recover as an organic environment. For example the grasslands for blue grass and walking horses in Shelbyville, TN are thin soil on top of hard limestone. Just what large meteor impacts produce.
Middle TN Basin Crater >
Kentucky Basin Crater >
The twin oil shadow craters. This is suggestive of a very large break apart twin impact as their environmental impact on the carbon period production is much the same.
The radon map shown below is suggestive of another uranium containing impact but in lower KY. And the less radon shadow is centered on the upper middle KY impact. This would be more indicative of three impacts and a non twin basin maker break apart except for the fact that the contaminating impact was later in lower middle TN. The sequence appears to be reversed in KY.
Is there opportunity to complete the ring of oil and gas around the Middle TN Basin? The lower third and western sections on the basin are also impact crater hits. There is a crater shown in the silurian strata in Lewis County. And a big oblique hit across Linclon and Giles.
<Lewis County Crater
Howell(Frankewing)Crater
These two impacts would cause a western and southward shift in the oil and gas. Completing the lower ring would occur in Alabama and Mississippi.
The impact concentric, location dependent multiple wiping events as noted in State of TN geology publication.
Basin crater bentonite bed >>
The massive bentonite bed made by the Middle TN basin busting impact and incineration is shown below as it appears inside the Frankewing, TN crater which is on it's deposit edge.
So unlike the holding of oil bentonite bedded craters the oil forming period was greatly disturbed by the subsequent Frankewing, TN impact. Chart below is from Bob Beavers Engineering from Wilson 1990.
The Howell/Petersburg Impact >>>>
The Chattanooga Shale as a shock sterile, slightly radioactive swirling chaos after impact.
Picture below is of swirling mass of shells in the Chattanooga shale found in southwest crater wall.
Old large craters are devoid of oil but have great tasting water. That is how they found the Manson, Iowa Crater. The water drillers noted the structure of the good tasting water. Middle, TN and the Howell/Petersburg crater have great tasting water. Shock blasted basins have a different type of metamorphic limestone sometimes called crypto crystalline.
So if a later smaller crater collects oil it would conform to that in the known oil craters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_crater
Middle Ordovician same as the basin buster. It is smaller and is said to have penetrated the dolomite. Chicxulub has oil, is large and later. So is a need for the oil to be around to pool there. Dependable great tasting water with large impacts besides the meteor left sulfur residual areas but not consistent oil sites or if anything exclusive with only run in from somewhere else is the real pattern here. Here is an article about the Crockett County, TX impact site and oil.
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/pdfz/documents/2015/10719maione/ndx_maione.pdf.html
Another interesting article.
https://www.geoexpro.com/articles/2017/02/the-wildest-plays-on-the-planet
Helium which is associated with Radon is a resource to look for in Frankewing, TN Impact irradiated area.
From the last cited article we get this statistic. "Around 40 commercial oil and gas fields have been discovered in craters, out of around 160 such structures identified worldwide, giving an impressive one in four discovery rate. " The problem with this statistic is craters are a politically approved process and rather than find oil in known craters they go out using modern oil exploration tools and find craters. It is only inasmuch as a crater forms an oil migration zone that crater oil is found. Middle TN was impacted down to bedrock before the carbon period while Chicxulub was hit after. Even worse (Frankewing) TN impact hit during the run up to the carbon period.
Craters breccia lens and the bentonite ash sequence under them would be a holding form for oil if there were oil. The karst zone surrounding craters is also a holding platform if there were oil. The middle Ordovician basin bentonite does not show oil and that appears to be the lowest bentonite layer. Conversely the minerals deposited by the many impacts is still being mined today.
New Type Breccia - This was found in a creek bed on Slate Rock Mill Road in Lincoln County, TN. What is so interesting is it looks like the oil slate rock inclusions that have been shocked so hard they are a new metamorphic form. This would imply that the oil slate was present when the meteor hit. Keep in mind that would be pre Mississippian. So shown below is a piece of the oil slate and you can see this is clearly an impactite. It shows shock metamorphism and the little white shock particle storm besides the obvious iron misting that comes back down from the meteor impact vapor. So this is like charcoal, organic material not completely burned up! That explains why LIncoln county only had the amount of oil it had. There really isn't much post impact geology evident in the crater. Just the wash back which was from that period also.
Socotra Impact Crater & Oil Field Effect - Notice the distance from the center of impact. This was a bullet type late impact. Fast dense, straight in the earth, though the earth's crust (Crustus Confractus).
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The temporal evolution of the Yemen Trap series is examined in the light of K-Ar radiometric data.
Rifting and volcanic activity characterize the Yemen plateau between 30 and 20 m.y. confirming a fairly common history of the Afro-Arabian plate on both sides of the Red Sea.
The fracking quakes identify an Ill and Ok crater. This crater wall rubble was settled but must resettle after disturbed.
Romania a country and a giant crater. The oil and gas collects in the crater walls as they have voids.
Minerals are blasted outward into the crater wall as veins, usually on the inside edge of crater wall.
The many crater coal circles of the United States. The organic material is heated and compressed by the impact event. This can result in a charcoal shale, oil shale, coal, oil or even diamond. Somewhere near the crossing of the lower circles in Alabama a diamond was found.
Oil shale or carbon shale is a more ash or pulverized limestone and explosion products material. Some shales lack a charcoal or oil content as it was all burned out in the impact explosion. As an impact signature it reflects the unique nature of impact explosions. The area that was impacted may not have been of high organic content. And alas the subsequent impacts and geology occurrences will distort the previous evidence. Nevertheless you can clearly see the big Michigan Impact in shale. The big Gulf of Mexico Impact keeps showing up. The Ordovician North Carolina/Tennessee border impact is evident. It is interesting that the NE oil field makes an arc in the shale which faces the Atlantic. Same with offshore Lower California.
Then there is the pressed down carbon type impact. Rather than sending it outward the basin crater becomes a sink of the carbon.
Going back to the big NE oil field as the lower Appalachian is a crater wall from the big Silurian Impact centered at the New Madrid fault it could assumed this is Devonian a more recent impact with higher carbon content.
As this crater signature falls over the Chesapeake Bay Impact it must be assumed that it is that impact. This is Wiki info: The Chesapeake Bay impact crater was formed by a bolide that impacted the eastern shore of North America about 35.5 ± 0.3 million years ago, in the late Eocene epoch. It is one of the best-preserved "wet-target" impact craters in the world.
And shown above is the Wiki world version of events. I have often stated that a crater is a nominal representation of the impact event. And the carbon signature bears that out. The organic push of heat and pressure made one of the earth's best carbon fields. Also you have to ask what effect this would have had on the continent crust. How much did it contribute to separation?
Notice how the outer edge of the Chesapeake Bay Crater there are three wave arcs. Not continuous. You may or may not find oil off the Atlantic an equal distance from the crater center. Best guess is not. This was an angled impact coming in from the east. This map is interesting as it shows a crater circle in the West Texas, Oklahoma Panhandle in gas.
APRIL 12, 2011 / 12:13 PM
Shark fossil found in Kentucky coal mine
Coal is formed from plant remains. Wonder what a shark was doing swimming in a forest?
Edward Haller Thank you for making that point. Another misconception is coal is formed from peat but there is no resemblance. Coal also has tree fossils connecting different layers indicating it is a fast formed process. I believe coal like other fast formed fossils to be part of a sweep of material from impact associated with crater exterior areas. Then the oil seeps from the coal to voids often impact related.
Improved mapping of the Gulf of Mexico shows what the earth really looks like showing cratering without vegetation. Mars has over 600,000 craters of a mile diameter or more and is about half the Earth's size. You are seeing cratering along the slope of the very large crater that made the Gulf as cratering is a progression of large to small over time as the Universe sorts its explosion material.
So lets take a look at this post Gulf of Mexico making crater, a smaller crater. It hit into a salty sea and compressed the organic material into oil. It was a direct compression hitting almost straight down but not a sphere as you can see the crater shows the mass arrangement of the impacting bolide. Jan. 19, 2023
Thomas William Bjerstedt
U.S. Department of the Interior · Gulf of Mexico Region New Orleans LA
Ph.D. West Virginia University
Ozocerite (shale gel) in rejection patterning. Impact pressure distilled organic in a multi substance form. Jan. 16, 2024.
2 Coal Craters of similar size. Impact has pressure and heat processed the organic material into coal. Does this mean the impacts were during the "Carboniferous" period? Jan. 19, 2024.
Bad Theory - Here we have the Kentucky University system teaching what is now old rejected theory as peat bogs are no longer regarded as the source of coal. Besides that there is no know volcanic source of this coal producing mechanism in KY. Also you notice the trace iron in the coal which is from the impacting bolide as there is no reason for the bog to have free iron imparting and volcanic iron does not look like that. Very similar to the Mississippi Valley Type reason for iron a crack in the earth's crust that can never be found. March 17, 2024. What's in Coal? Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky (uky.edu)
Coal is not a compressed peat bog. 1918 coal miners and tree stump, this was carbonized intact. Impact made compression. March 27, 2024.
Coal Ball Conglomerate - Impact sphere and impact nodule connected by surface binder. The sphere and nodule contain sub spheres. Calcite/dolomite composition and found in coal fields the impact blast takes the surface strata impacted and turns it into blast drops which are blasted into the coal. The coal is a heat and pressure product from the impact blast turning the organic material into a carbon mass. June 12, 2024. Specimen from Prairie Research Institute • University of Illinois
All impacts are unique. Notice the different carbonizing patterns for these two large impacts. Now consider the problem with strata based dating and impact accretion made Earth. Coal is known from Precambrian strata, which predate land plants. This coal is presumed to have originated from residues of algae. Impact turns over the previous planes and reforms them including newly made carbonized material. Event time not strata time is the more plausible explanation. June, 12, 2024.
La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, CA. This compressed organic material is actively breaking down even today. At the time of this impact there was a lot of organic material. Oct. 23, 2024.
A partial record of this impact can be seen from the shape of the California coast. Raft/Plate tectonics is not physically good for forming arcs shapes. You can test that theory easily with sheets of foil or paper pushed together. Also exposures of Precambrian rock are a good clue that impact has pushed them up. Combine that with the metamorphic nature of surrounding rocks, including impact spheres etc. and you have impact. The western crater is not easily visible and as a type 2 subduction crater coming in from the west it entered the earth's crust. Oct. 23, 2024.
Impact makes arcs and circles easily. Oct. 23, 2024.
Geomorphological Features
Folds in Lower and Middle Cretaceous coal and clastics at a mine at Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada.
