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The break in storm clouds to the north gave dimension to the sky’s enormity. There passing by pale hills dusted with spring snow, pumpjacks dipped up and down in monotony.

Dr. Kent Sundell — bearded, blue-eyed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a shirt with countless pockets — drove the van north on I-25 toward Douglas. He’s a Casper College geology professor. His student, Zachary Tenney, sat beside him. Two tourists from Texas and Oregon, both visiting Casper for an outdoor writers conference, sat quietly in the back.

A little ways outside of Douglas, Sundell pulled off onto a dirt road headed toward Sheep Mountain and stopped. Everyone got out in the wind and cold. He pointed to a blemish on the side of the mountain, a mole on its rugged face.

Casper College geology professor Dr. Kent Sundell points to an impact crater on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The crater is one of many that make up what scientists call the Wyoming impact crater field. 

“Once your eye is trained, you’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s a crater, that’s a crater!’”

Craters pockmark the side of the mountain. A petroleum geologist named Gene George found the first of them — SM-1, also known now as George’s crater — by accident in the ‘90s. Over the ensuing decades, his discovery spurred others to find more craters in the area, which they did.

They’re part of a crater field bounded by Casper, Douglas and Laramie, stretching along the outcrops of what’s described in the language of geologists as the upper Permo-Pennsylvanian Casper Sandstone Formation, just below the Permian-Triassic redbed sequence of sedimentary rock. Scientists call it the Wyoming impact crater field.

It’s about 280 million years old, among the largest, and by far the oldest, impact crater fields on Earth. One can find plenty such fields on moons and other planets. But things are different here. Oceans hide meteor impacts. Water and wind and plants and tectonic deformation distort and knead craters to unrecognizability. On our planet, they’re ephemeral; others documented so far are no older than 63,500 years. Even the craters in Douglas were once buried. Over time, they were unearthed again as the redbeds eroded away.

A road near the site of the Wyoming impact crater field on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. A team of scientists and students from Casper College and the University of Wyoming are studying the crater field to try and figure out if it was formed as part of a worldwide event. 

Everyone got back into the van. Sundell drove across a cattle guard, turned right onto a path worn with faint tire tracks. The van jostled across brush until Sundell brought it to a stop near the base of the mountain. Hiking up the incline, there’s a rock quarry to the right, a vast expanse of land to the left. The craters are in varying states of preservation — some classic rings, others mottled and eaten away, disguised under brush.

Scientists don’t know what made the crater field, but some are trying to find out. Sundell has a hypothesis about their origin that, if proven to be true, could change our understanding of our solar system’s history. It’s the enormity of this idea and its possible implications that he attempted to impress upon the writer-tourists, guarded against the Wyoming wind in their brightly colored puffer jackets, that spring morning.

In 2017, Sundell hosted a field trip to the crater field the Sunday before the solar eclipse. Among those who came along were Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the last person and the only geologist to walk on the moon, and retired petroleum geologist Doug Cook. At the time, the extent of the crater field — at least what they had found of it — was still relatively small. On Aug. 21 of that year, the scientists and students set up telescopes by the North Platte River to watch the moon swallow up the sun’s light. Sundell said the eclipse is what made him want to look for other astronomically unique phenomena in Wyoming.

Cook was acquainted with Dr. Thomas Kenkmann, a famed geologist, impact specialist and professor at Germany’s University of Freiburg, whom he had met while doing research in Saudi Arabia.

That spring, Kenkmann flew from Germany with a graduate student to see the craters for himself. The same year, Sundell, Cook and Kenkmann published their first research paper on the craters.

University of Wyoming Department of Geology and Geophysics technician Matt Elliot (left) and University of Wyoming geology professor Bradley Carr (right) stand next to the drill rig at the top of SM-1, also known as George's crater, on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The team of scientists and students used the drill to collect rock samples from the crater. 

They thought at first that the craters were made by the breakup of a single asteroid as it entered the atmosphere; the ones they had found lined up like points at the tip of a palm frond, as if they had radiated from a single source. Sundell described the impacts, poking his finger in the air along a line and illustrating with different sounds: “Pop, pop, pop, pop! Ding, ding, ding, ding!”

But then they found more craters, covering an area too large to result from the breakup of a single asteroid. They came up with a new hypothesis; an asteroid hit the Earth somewhere near the Wyoming-Nebraska border, blasting off smaller bits called ejecta upon impact. The ejecta came hurtling back toward Earth again. Some of them landed in the Douglas area, making what’s called secondary craters.

If that hypothesis is eventually accepted as true, it would be a significant discovery. Secondary craters have been found on moons and other planets, but never on Earth. In studying secondary craters, planetary scientists have been resigned to examining them from across millions of miles of space. Having access to them on Earth, however, could change how they’re studied on other planetary bodies.

But Sundell was skeptical. The shocked quartz from extreme heat and pressure, the upwelled walls; these craters were made by meteorites traveling near terminal velocity when they hit Earth. Sundell’s oldest student Allan Fraser, a physicist and mathematician who formerly worked at Johns Hopkins University, played with the numbers. His calculation shows that a meteorite would have to nearly escape Earth’s atmosphere and gravity to return at such speed, a scenario that, though mathematically possible, Sundell thought unlikely. Some of the craters are also layered, suggesting they didn’t hit the Earth simultaneously but rather over a period of time.

Casper College geology professor Dr. Kent Sundell points to an area of high conductivity on a resistivity map of SM-1, also known as George's crater, on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The team of scientists and students, led by Sundell, collected samples from the conductive area, which they will use to figure out how the crater was formed. 

Sundell has another idea; he thinks there may be more craters to find in the area, that the craters were made by meteorites hitting Earth over thousands of years in a worldwide event, and that those meteorites may have come from the explosion of a moon or planet that once existed in our solar system.

Kenkmann, however, has so far stayed firm with the other hypothesis. He thinks the clustered and rayed arrangement of the craters — as well as their elliptical to ovoid shape, which his team used to reconstruct trajectories that seem to meet in a single area — better prove the idea that they’re secondary craters.

But Sundell doesn’t see the pattern of the craters in the same way. To him, they look less orderly and more like marks from a shotgun blast.

“We don’t always agree with each other,” Sundell said in the van, chuckling. “He said that it means they all came from one impact, and I said, ‘No it doesn’t.’”

That was the point at which Sundell decided to go his own way and pursue a different path of research.

University of Wyoming geology professor Bradley Carr (left) and Matt Elliot, a technician at the University of Wyoming's Department of Geology and Geophysics (right), try to adjust the drill rig on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. Scientists and students used the rig to drill samples of rock. They will compare the chemical signatures of those samples with those from other craters. 

The mountain was warm and mostly brown in September.

Two men hustled around a couple plastic water tanks sitting on the dry dirt. Their names are Brandon Brown and Mike Carter. They were both once Sundell’s geology students at Casper College, who transitioned from other fields after injuries. Carter got hit in the head and broke his neck working construction. Brown tore all the tendons in his hand in an oilfield.

“It was just time to slow down and do something with our minds rather than our bodies,” Carter said. “We’re still out there swinging a sledgehammer or a shovel, but it’s a lot more fun.”

Brown lit a cigarette. He wore a Raiders shirt, cargo shorts, small, silver earrings; Carter, sunglasses, a jean shirt and pants. Both sported beards.

“Do all my students have beards?” Sundell said. “No.”

Brown and Carter got involved with Sundell’s crater research in 2018. That summer, they helped him create what’s called a resistivity map of SM1, also known as George’s Crater after the petroleum geologist, Gene George, who discovered it. They laid out a line of cable, interrupted every five yards or so by a probe, over the top of the mountain. The cable attached to big truck batteries that induced an electrical current, and the speed at which the current moved between each probe helped them see where the earth and rock beneath the surface of the mountain was conductive or resistive.

Sundell had the resistivity map printed on some computer paper. It looks like a rectangle cut out from a tie-dye shirt. Dots frame the top of the rectangle. Numbers indicating depth frame the left of it. A bright blue mass surrounded by red fills a section of the map. That’s the crater. The blue area is 10,000 times more conductive than the surrounding red.

Casper College student Allan Fraser holds a "core," which is a section of rock from the impact crater that will get tested for specific rocks on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas.

“The question is, what’s making that so conductive?” Sundell asked. He thinks it could be the remains of the meteorite that made George’s crater.

Up on the mountain, a man in a bright orange shirt stood next to a tall contraption on the crest of George’s Crater. The contraption emitted a faint whine that permeated the air. It’s a drill rig that Sundell and his team borrowed from the University of Wyoming, and the man was Dr. Bradley Carr. He’s a University of Wyoming geophysicist and director of the school’s Near Surface Geophysics Instrumentation Center. “But I have a side-gig as a driller,” he joked.

They were using the drill to harvest rock samples from George’s crater, and in those samples they’ll look for platinum group minerals — platinum, palladium, iridium, nickel, chrome, cobalt, possibly gold — elements that often occur together in iron-rich meteorites. At some point, they’ll be able to take those chemical signatures and measure them up to those from other craters in the impact field, and that comparison will tell them if Sundell’s hypothesis is wrong, or if it might be right; the same signature among the craters would likely mean they came from a single asteroid. But if they’re different, that could mean the meteorites came from a larger body — possible a moon or a planet, both of which wouldn’t have the same signature all the way through.

Water flowing through a blue hose lubricates the drill rig on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The drill is used to extract rock samples that scientists will use to determine if the craters are secondary or were created through a different process. 

If the research gets to this point, the scientists could expand that comparison to samples taken all over Earth at that same place just below the Permian redbed sequence.

Sundell drove the truck up the mountain, turning left on a rugged path marked with small, pink flags. A tent housing all their gear sat about 30 yards from the drill. Next to the tent stood a table with cardboard boxes broken up into long, rectangular compartments. The compartments held samples they had already cored out of the earth.

Fraser, Sundell’s oldest student, the former Johns Hopkins physicist and mathematician, and Conner Stafford, Sundell’s youngest student, fresh out of high school, stood by the table. They both wore yellow hard hats. Stafford held a cylinder of rock. He’s known Sundell for a long time; his dad and Sundell’s son are both firefighters, and Sundell used to take him fossil hunting when he was a kid.

“He’s been trained by firefighters, so he can swing a sledgehammer and lift a lot of heavy things,” Sundell said, laughing.

SM-1, also known as George's crater after petroleum geologist Gene George who discovered it, is seen in an aerial photo. 

Some feet away from the table lay an inflatable pool filled with water, and out of the pool a blue hose climbed the incline toward the lip of the crater and up to the drill rig.

On the way back down the mountain, Sundell chuckled.

“I’m just smiling, because it’s moving in my direction all the time.”

But Sundell’s idea is still just a hypothesis, and it could be proven wrong at any step. The drilling concluded Oct. 2. The samples have to be processed. They’ll have to make more resistivity maps and drill more samples; science is a slow, long process of infinitesimal steps to piece together an image of the universe. Some of those infinitesimal steps will inevitably go in the wrong direction.

“It will be the most important thing I do in my life, if it goes that far,” Sundell said back in April, sitting in a small gully sheltered from the wind with his student and the two tourist-writers. He looked out across the range, red and green and turning white under snow.

“But, I could be wrong.”

Cows wandered around George’s Crater. Flecks of hard snow pecked at the ground. Clouds converged and broke apart again. The rest of the crew had finished their lunches and sat mostly in silence, numbed by the cold.

After a moment lost in thought, Sundell spoke.

“Anyway,” he said. “I’d better stop talking and eat my sandwich.”

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University of Wyoming geology professor Bradley Carr (left) and Matt Elliot, a technician at the University of Wyoming's Department of Geology and Geophysics (right), try to adjust the drill rig on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. Scientists and students used the rig to drill samples of rock. They will compare the chemical signatures of those samples with those from other craters. 

University of Wyoming Department of Geology and Geophysics technician Matt Elliot (left) and University of Wyoming geology professor Bradley Carr (right) stand next to the drill rig at the top of SM-1, also known as George's crater, on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The team of scientists and students used the drill to collect rock samples from the crater. 

Casper College geology professor Dr. Kent Sundell points to an area of high conductivity on a resistivity map of SM-1, also known as George's crater, on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The team of scientists and students, led by Sundell, collected samples from the conductive area, which they will use to figure out how the crater was formed. 

Casper College geology professor Dr. Kent Sundell points to an impact crater on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The crater is one of many that make up what scientists call the Wyoming impact crater field. 

A road near the site of the Wyoming impact crater field on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. A team of scientists and students from Casper College and the University of Wyoming are studying the crater field to try and figure out if it was formed as part of a worldwide event. 

SM-1, also known as George's crater after petroleum geologist Gene George who discovered it, is seen in an aerial photo. 

Water flowing through a blue hose lubricates the drill rig on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas. The drill is used to extract rock samples that scientists will use to determine if the craters are secondary or were created through a different process. 

Casper College student Allan Fraser holds a "core," which is a section of rock from the impact crater that will get tested for specific rocks on Monday, Sept. 26 outside of Douglas.

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