V. Ben Meen and the Riddle of Chubb Crater

Abstract

Aerial photographs of Chubb Crater, a striking 3.4 km-wide circular basin in the far north of Quebec, led the Ontario prospector Fred W. Chubb to think it might be an extinct volcano, and possibly the site of a diamond-bearing diatreme. V. Ben Meen, the Director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Geology and Mineralogy in Toronto, however, suspected it was an impact crater caused by a meteorite. Meen led two expeditions to the crater in 1950 and 1951. Despite early opposition and the initial absence of corroborative field evidence, he held on to a persistent belief in the crater's meteoritic origin. Later fieldwork ultimately provided strong evidence in support of this view. The discovery of the crater led to the development of a program at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa to search for additional impact craters on the Canadian Shield, and the development of valuable criteria by which they could be authenticated. The craters discovered through the program fit well on the Baldwin curve relating crater depth to diameter, and lent strong support to the argument for the relationship between the meteoritic origin of lunar craters and terrestrial impact structures. Chubb Crater is of historical importance because it was the first meteorite crater to be recognized in Canada, and the first anywhere to be authenticated in the absence of associated meteorites.