THE KAMIL CRATER (EGYPT): A TYPE STRUCTURE FOR SMALL IMPACT CRATERS ON EARTH

The Kamil crater is a small (45 m in diameter) impact crater in southwestern Egypt (22°01'06"N, 26°05'16"E) that was discovered by Vincenzo de Michele (formerly Civico Museo di Storia Naturale, Milan, Italy) and subsequently investigated by our research group through the first Italian-Egyptian geophysical survey in 2010 and subsequent laboratory work [1–8]. The data set gathered so far provides a nearly full characterization of the impact structure and projectile (Table 1) and documents that Kamil crater is a nearly pristine structure generated by the hypervelocity impact of a small iron meteorite. As such, Kamil Crater can be considered as a type structure that could serve as ground-truth for experimental and numerical models for small impact craters on Earth. Note, for instance,,that most of our data about shock metamorphism and the physical-chemical interaction between target and projectile during impact melting at Kamil Crater [5, 8] are consistent with those obtained in analog hypervelocity impact cratering experiments by the MEMIN project [9, 10], thereby validating their experimental set up and results, at least for small-scale impacts generated by iron meteorite bodies. The aim of our paper is thus to stimulate interest in the Kamil Crater and seek for cooperative efforts to merge our field and laboratory data with experiments and numerical models.