1.0 Introduction
Impact craters are important because they are responsible for massive extinctions, can serve as natural laboratories for studying broad geological processes and are associated with ore bodies and hydrocarbon deposits (French, 2004; Grieve and Masaitis, 1994; Marvin, 1999 ). Increasing interest in space exploration has compelled a renewed interest in understanding meteorite impact events. One major use of impact crater studies in space exploration is estimating the age of the surface of a solid planetary body (Michel and Morbidelli, 2012 ). Most solid planetary bodies and satellites have a history of accumulated impact craters on their surfaces. These craters come in many sizes. The age of a surface is related to the number of impacts it has endured, assuming a constant impact rate across time. The total number of craters may therefore be used to determine how old a surface is if it is feasible to estimate the rate of crater creation on that surface.
Compared with Mars, which has over 300,000 impact craters with at least 1 km diameter, only 188 have been identified on Earth so far (Hergarten and Kenkmann, 2015 ). The lower number of discovered craters is obviously due to the Earth’s weathering process, which presents a challenge to identifying craters on Earth. But there has been an increasing amount of research dedicated to investigating impact craters worldwide. Progressive research has focused on distinguishing impact craters from their surroundings (Glikson and Haines, 2005; Koeberl and Anderson, 1996; Koeberl and MacLeod, 2002 ). Previous work has established that most of the geological characteristics associated with impact craters are not unique, e.g., their generally circular shape, circular deformation pattern, extensive fracturing and brecciation, circular gravity and magnetic anomalies, and the presence of sizable igneous rock units (French and Koeberl, 2010 ). Other conventional processes like tectonic deformation, salt-dome formation, volcanic eruption, or internal igneous activity can also generate such geological characteristics. Distinct identifying signatures are shock-metamorphic effects which are particular outcomes of an impact’s shock waves(Grieve, 1991; Stöffler and Langenhorst, 1994 ). Continuous research in identifying formerly unrecognised impact craters and their evolution is critical. However, a cursory look at the literature shows that the distribution of research output and researchers participating in impact crater research is not uniformly distributed.
In Ghana, West Africa is one of the youngest well-preserved mid-sized Impact Craters known as the Bosumtwi Impact Crater. According toKarp et al. (2002 ), the Bosumtwi Impact Crater is “more comparable in form and impact to lunar and planetary craters than other terrestrial craters”. This paper explores the current state of geophysical research in the Bosumtwi Impact Crater, focusing on analysing what part has been played in this research by local researchers. Specifically, this study will seek to answer the following questions concerning the Bosumtwi Impact Crater: what is the yearly distribution of publications on geophysical investigations; what is the country distribution of publications on geophysical investigations; what is the funding distribution of publications on geophysical investigations; which geophysical methods have been applied and how were they utilised? In this paper, our principal focus has been on understanding the contribution of researchers in-country to geophysical research in an obviously scientifically important place.
The study is organised into the following sections: Section 1 covers the study’s introduction. Section 2 outlines the geophysical methods used in discovering impact craters. Section 3 provides information on the systematic review methodology used in this study. Section 4 outlines the results of this study, including publication distribution yearly, publication distribution on a country basis, publication distribution on a funding basis and the specific applications of geophysics in the Bosumtwi Impact Crater. Sections 5 and 6 discuss the findings and present the study’s conclusions.