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Answers for NASA may lie at Hillcrest Park
LINDSAY LAFRAUGH
September 26, 2007, 8:17 pm

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Researchers from across the globe were in Thunder Bay this week gathering information that may some day be used on a NASA mission to Mars.
Professors and graduate students from the likes of Harvard and Penn State universities, and institutions as far way as England and Japan were in the city researching one-of-a-kind rocks that are nearly 2,000 million years old.
The so-called ejecta rocks are debris from a meteor that hit what is now Sudbury, 1,850 million years ago.
“The crater (in Sudbury) is about 280 kilometres across. If you put all of the nuclear weapons we have today, from every country, in a big pile and set them off all at once, you would get maybe one-tenth of the energy that this impact had,” said Phil Fralick, chairman of the department of geology at Lakehead University.
The entire world was covered in debris from the meteor‘s impact, but the larger pieces and the most evidence lies right here in Northwestern Ontario.
At the time of the meteor, during the Proterozoic Aeon, North America consisted basically of just the Canadian Shield. The Atlantic Ocean stretched to just south of Thunder Bay, with its coast line running through what is now Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The impact of the meteor caused an earthquake and a tsunami that ripped most of the evidence away, but locally the rocks can still be seen at tourist attractions like Hillcrest Park and Mount McKay.
“These researchers are working on ideas of how these rocks apply to ancient life on Earth,‘‘ Fralick said Wednesday.
“When they return to their home institutions, they will be able to work with some of the ideas and apply them to figuring out how all of this can be incorporated into some of the upcoming probes that will be going to Mars, looking for bacterial life.
“NASA plans to send a probe to Mars in about 10 years from now, to bring samples back to Earth. With this research we can try to figure out what types of samples we should be interested in,” said Fralick.

The layer of ejecta in Thunder Bay was found by former Westgate high school teachers Greg Brampton and Bill Addison.
The pair spent 10 years looking for the rock that lies between two separate rock formations – one with fossils and one that is fossil absent.
“We started asking if these rocks could represent an extinction event similar to the one of the dinosaurs,” said Addison.
“It was a retirement project. The problem was that Greg and I are not geologists, so we were floundering around in our own ignorance as much as anything, so that‘s why it took so long to find. That‘s the way geology is. Things can stare you in the face and you can look at something for years and you wouldn‘t realize it.
“I tobogganed at and played all over (Hillcrest Park) as a kid, never knowing that I was playing on a tsunami impact layer.”
Former Lakehead University geology student Pier Pufahl was among the researchers conducting studies.
“I attended Lakehead because I wanted to go to an institution where the rocks were at your back door and where many of the labs and classes were taught in this natural laboratory,‘‘ Pufahl said.
“This is the kind of atmosphere you should be learning geology in,” he said.
The group‘s journey ends today in Atikokan. They‘ve been on the road for 10 days, making stops in places like Sudbury, New Liskeard and Marathon.
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