Buried Missile

At his desk in the University of Toronto last week, a geologist, Victor Ben Meen, was drafting his report on the first big expedition to the Chubb Crater in far northern Canada. He was already satisfied on one point: the crater was almost certainly made by a great meteorite, perhaps 150 ft. in diameter, that plunged into the Canadian tundra and then exploded, many thousands of years ago.

The Chubb Crater and the lake that now fills it will never be a handy tourist attraction like Arizona's meteorite crater near Canyon Diablo. It is close to Hudson Strait, on a granite plain so desolate that even arctic animals prefer to live somewhere else. Discovered by Prospector Fred W. Chubb (who noticed its telltale circular shape in an air photo), it was briefly explored by Geologist Meen in the summer of 1950 (TIME, Aug. 14, 1950) with inconclusive results. He decided that it had not been caused by a volcanic explosion or glacial action; but there was no positive proof that it had been caused by a meteor.

Last summer's expedition, financed by the National Geographic Society, carried in a planeload of equipment and set out to find the evidence. Attempts to find fragments of nickel-iron from the meteorite were unsuccessful. The expedition's mine detectors (lent by the U.S. Army) were scarcely more useful: they gave too many indications, squealed excitedly whenever they were brought near an ordinary granite boulder. Apparently, said Geologist Meen, the granite of the region contains enough magnetic iron ore to drive a mine detector wild.

Then the expedition tried dragging powerful magnets over the ground, hoping to pick up fragments of nickel-iron. The soil around the Arizona crater is full of such stuff, but not one bit did they find near the Chubb Crater. Geologist Meen suspects that the Chubb meteorite may have been made largely of stone, which disintegrated on impact and drifted away as dust.

The final test, a magnetometer survey, was hastily completed just before the quick-coming arctic winter was about to close down. The scientists carried a sensitive magnetometer all around the crater, charting the magnetic lines of force. Under the northern rim they found what they were looking for: a "magnetic anomaly" indicating that a large mass of metal-bearing material lies buried far below the surface.

It was the exact spot where a buried meteorite should be. The northern rim of the crater is higher than the others, so the meteorite probably slanted down from the south, burying itself under the granite slightly to the north of the crater. This evidence, added to the shape of the lake and the "ripples" in the granite around it, convinces Dr. Meen that the crater is meteoric. If it is, it is the largest interplanetary shell hole (more than two miles across) that anyone has yet discovered on the earth's surface.

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