Wednesday, September 4, 2013

An Ancient Meteorite Impact Crater in Saint-Laurent-la-Vernède?

Now I might be seeing things that are not actually there (an old human trait, I take it), but to my (untrained) eye it looks like there might have been (during our geologic past) an meteoroid impact at an oblique angle in the area where today lies Saint-Laurent-la-Vernède (44°06′21″N 4°27′31″E, in the south of France, department Gard):

The French township of Saint-Laurent-la-Vernède lies in an depression, the elongated green ring of forests constitutes an ridge, and the fields around that again form an depression. The ring has an very coarsely approximated length of something over 7 km (heading 280 degrees) and a width of 1.5 km. The western end of the ridge is more rounded than the eastern end, and there in the west is a hill of sorts around the town of La Bruguière. The larger green forest are part of some local hills, framing the entire area (except to the east-south-east). Forests and fields do not exactly follow hills and depressions, but give a good indication of the topology in that area.

Now I am no expert in these matters, and there might have been other geologic forces creating this, like for example glaciers and long gone streams shaping some geologic fault. But damn, wouldn't that be cool, if this were the result of an meteorite impact?

In the south-east, the D166 road (44°05'50.33" N, 4°30'52.30" E) were the small river "La Tave" pierces through the ridge to drain to the east towards the Rhone. Some strata are visible in Google's Streetview. What could a geologist find around here?

Surely there should be geologic reports about that region? Alas, my search engine skills are not good enough to find something… When, a couple of years ago, I stumbled in Google Earth upon the old river valley of the Donau ("Urdonau") in the "Wellheimer Trockental" between Rennertshofen and Dollnstein, I was at least able to find sites about this. But here? I found nothing in the internet about this geologic formation.

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