The Prairies' Craters Are Hiding Something Nobody Talks About

In July 2007, two people with a metal detector were pulling meteorite iron out of the woods near Whitecourt, Alberta. The hollow beside them was believed to be a sinkhole. It was a crater, no more than about 1,100 years old. And seven years earlier, three scientists in Calgary had worked out that Alberta alone should have taken about 500 hits that left craters more than a kilometre wide. Alberta has three confirmed. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com This documentary follows the eleven confirmed impact craters of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and how they were found: by drill bits, gravity surveys and seismic echoes, usually by people looking for something else. Whitecourt and Chris Herd's lidar scans. Steen River, hit by an Imperial Oil wildcat well in 1963 and now the largest known crater in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. Saint Martin in Manitoba, found by Bralorne Petroleum in 1966, the gypsum it preserved, the fluoride in its groundwater, and the 1998 "crater chain" theory in Nature that newer dates pulled apart. Gow Lake and the end-Triassic extinction. Carswell, the crater that lifted the richest uranium ore of its day to within reach at Cluff Lake. Viewfield, the Saskatchewan oil pool that Sawatzky called a crater in 1972, and Red Wing Creek across the border. The salt layer that fakes craters on seismic. Deep Bay and West Hawk Lake. The waiting list: Bow City, Eagle Butte, Dumas, Hartney and Hotchkiss. The Buzzard Coulee fireball of 2008, the Bruderheim fall of 1960, and a meteorite in an Edmonton rain gutter. Then Alan Hildebrand, Chicxulub, Pemex, and the estimate that most of Alberta's missing craters are probably sitting in oil company seismic records, filed under something else. Sources include the Earth Impact Database (University of New Brunswick), Western University's Impact Earth database, the Alberta Register of Historic Places, Kofman, Herd and Froese (2010), Carrigy and Short (1968), McCabe and Bannatyne (1970), Spray, Kelley and Rowley in Nature (1998), Schmieder et al. (2014), the U.S. Geological Survey (1981), Orano and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Sawatzky (1972, 1975), Donofrio (1981, 1998), Grieve (2005), the Alberta Geological Survey, the University of Calgary, Natural Resources Canada, and Mazur, Stewart and Hildebrand in the CSEG Recorder (2000). Where sources disagree, on crater ages, sizes and discovery dates, the narration says so. The Cluff Lake mine sits in Treaty 8 territory and the homeland of the Métis. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.