Wilkes Land crater

Conjectured impact craters beneath the ice cap of Antarctica
Wilkes Land crater is an informal term that may apply to two separate cases of conjectured giant impact craters hidden beneath the ice cap of Wilkes Land, East Antarctica. These are separated below under the heading Wilkes Land anomaly and Wilkes Land mascon (mass concentration), based on terms used in their principal published reference sources.

A giant impact crater beneath the Wilkes Land ice sheet was first proposed by Richard A. Schmidt in 1962 on the basis of the seismic and gravity discovery of the feature made by the U. S. Victoria Land Traverse in 1959–60 (VLT), and the data provided to Schmidt by John G. Weihaupt, geophysicist of the VLT (Geophysical Studies in Victoria Land, Antarctica, Report No. 1, Geophysical and Polar Research Center, University of Wisconsin, 1–123). Schmidt further considered the possibility that it might be the elusive source of the tektites of the Australasian strewnfield (which is only 790,000 years old). The hypothesis was detailed in a paper by Weihaupt in 1976. Evidence cited included a large negative gravity anomaly coincident with a subglacial topographic depression across and having a minimum depth of
The claims were challenged by Charles R. Bentley in 1979. On the basis of a 2010 paper by Weihaupt et al., Bentley's challenge was proven to be incorrect, and the Earth Impact Database (Rajmon 2011) has now reclassified the Wilkes Land Anomaly from a "possible impact crater" to a "probable impact crater" on the basis of Weihaupt et al. 's paper. Several other potential impact crater sites have now been proposed by other investigators in the Ross Sea, West Antarctica, and the Weddell Sea.

The Wilkes Land mass concentration (or mascon) is centered at and was first reported at a conference in May 2006 by a team of researchers led by Ralph von Frese and Laramie Potts of Ohio State University. The team used gravity measurements by NASA's GRACE satellites to identify a wide mass concentration and noted that this mass anomaly is centered within a larger ring like structure visible in radar images of the land surface beneath the Antarctic ice cap. That combination suggested to them that the feature may mark the site of a wide impact crater buried beneath the ice and more than 2.5 times larger than the Chicxulub crater. Due to the site's location beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, there are no direct samples to test for evidence of impact. There are alternative explanations for this mass concentration, such as formation by a mantle plume or other large scale volcanic activity, but a variety of research methods lend support to the impact hypothesis. If impact crater hypothesis is correct, based on the size of the ring structure, it has been suggested by Frese's team that the impactor could have been four or five times wider than the Chicxulub impactor, which is believed to have caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. However, there are already other suggested candidates for giant impacts at the Permian–Triassic boundary, such as Bedout, off the northern coast of Western Australia, although all are equally contentious and it is currently under debate whether or not an impact played any role in this extinction. The complete absence of a well defined impact ejecta layer associated with the Permian–Triassic boundary at its outcrops within Victoria Land and the central Transantarctic Mountains argues against there having been any impact capable of creating a crater the size of the hypothesized Wilkes Land impact crater within Antarctica at the Permian–Triassic boundary. Nonetheless, according to Frese, recent studies in 2018 seem to sustain the impact origin of the crater, and the event may be linked to the separation of Eastern Antarctica from southern Australia.