Introducing 2020 Barringer Medal Recipient: Joanna Morgan

Photo provided by Dr. Morgan, showing her on the platform when they drilled into the Chicxulub impact crater

Joanna Morgan is a Professor of Geophysics at Imperial College London 

Barringer Crater Company is proud to announce the 2020 Barringer Medal Recipient Joanna Morgan, for her outstanding work in the field of impact cratering and/or work that has led to a better understanding of impact phenomena.

Joanna received the Barringer award for her work on the Chicxulub impact crater.  She first heard about Chicxulub in the mid 1990s when scientists were arguing about its size and morphology, and whether it was the site of the K-T impact.  Joanna is a seismologist, and she co-led two experiments to acquire seismic data across the crater in 1996 and 2005, which were used to determine that the crater was a multiring basin with a diameter of ~200 km.  Beautiful images of Chicxulub’s peak ring showed that it is formed from rocks that have a surprisingly low seismic velocity (and density), and that the peak ring was located directly above downthrown sedimentary rocks.   This led the group to speculate that peak rings were formed from rocks that were initially part of an over-heightened zone of central uplift that then collapsed outwards and ended up above the inward collapsing transient crater rim.   Joanna was one of the co-chief scientists who led IODP-ICDP Expedition 364 that drilled into Chicxulub’s peak ring, and one of the drilling objectives was to test this formational model.  This drilling expedition also showed that life came back into the ocean above the crater surprisingly quickly, within months to years after the impact, and that microbial life inhabited the peak-ring rocks until the present time.  Joanna’s research includes modelling how Chicxulub ejecta are transported around the world in a dust cloud, quantifying the release of climate-active gases by this impact, and demonstrating that wildfires are ignited by ejecta re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, but that most of the global wildfires are ignited later by natural causes.