The Lake Bosumtwi meteorite impact structure, Ghana—A magnetic image from a third observational level

Abstract

The Bosumtwi impact structure in Ghana is the youngest and best-preserved medium-sized impact structure on Earth, and because of the vast amount of prior geophysical and geological data gathered in the area, it constitutes a great natural laboratory to try to develop new geophysical interpretation and modeling techniques. During the 2004 International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) drilling campaign at Lake Bosumtwi, we made magnetic field observations at 162 stations around the lake. This study differs from all previous magnetic surveys at Bosumtwi, which only measured the scalar portion of the Earth’s magnetic field, in that we measured the full magnetic vector at each station. Acquisition of the full magnetic vector was made possible by innovative use of a borehole deviation probe, which uses a magnetic sensor for absolute orientation reference. Estimates of the magnetic vector orientation and magnitude at each observation station were derived from a series of measurements collected at 50 cm spacing over a depth range of 25 m. In this study, we report a comparison between the scalar total field intensity derived from this new survey approach with the other two previously acquired marine and airborne magnetic data sets. The scalar total magnetic intensity (TMI) computed from the vector data set compares in close agreement with the other two data sets. Some discrepancies between the data sets can be explained by differences in the distances between the sensor and the magnetic sources for the various surveys. The highlight of this study is that we demonstrate that is possible to acquire at least partial vector data with readily available instrumentation.