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Updated: Jan 30, 2026

Isolation and Identification of Bacterial Strains from Skin of Terrestrial Amphibians
Published on: June 17, 2025
Evidence for igneous differentiation in Sudbury Igneous Complex and impact-driven evolution of terrestrial planet
Rais Latypov1, Sofya Chistyakova2, Richard Grieve3
1School of Geosciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. rais.latypov@wits.ac.za.
Abstract:
Bolide impact is a ubiquitous geological process in the Solar System, which produced craters and basins filled with impact melt sheets on the terrestrial planets. However, it remains controversial whether these sheets were able to undergo large-scale igneous differentiation, or not. Here, we report on the discovery of large discrete bodies of melanorites that occur throughout almost the entire stratigraphy of the 1.85-billion-year-old Sudbury Igneous Complex (SIC) - the best exposed impact melt sheet on Earth - and use them to reaffirm that conspicuous norite-gabbro-granophyre stratigraphy of the SIC is produced by fractional crystallization of an originally homogeneous impact melt of granodioritic composition. This implies that more ancient and compositionally primitive Hadean impact melt sheets on the Earth and other terrestrial planets also underwent large-volume igneous differentiation. The near-surface differentiation of these giant impact melt sheets may therefore have contributed to the evolution and lithological diversity of the proto-crust on terrestrial planets.
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