Chapter 3

Discussion
3.1

PROFILES

.

the effect of the causeway and the deposition
of the sand spit south and east of the crater are

For discussion, it is somewhat more con-

venient to present the results of these craters
in the form of profiles derived from the cofitour maps, Figs. 2.1 to 2.4. These profiles
appear as dashed lines in Figs. 3.1 to 3.4. On
each of these figures the full line is a theoreti-

clearly long-time developments which do not
reflect the actual crater shape.

cal line, used for comparison later.
It will be observed on Fig. 2,1 that data were
obtained along a number of rays in the Green-

house Dog crater. Figure 3.1 contains these
results as dashed lines, plotted at distances

from Ground Zero, and at the various angles
indicated by the array of points on Fig. 2.1.
The crater is observed to be quite irregular

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in shape, having a maximum depth apparently
less than 3 ft. The existence of mounds in the

Figure 3.4 is the crater profile from Ivy Mike

derived from Fig. 2.4, which shows a maximum
depth of 170 ft at first glance as the depth of the
Mike crater. The interesting point is that the
deep hole occurs some 350 ft from Ground Zero.
The chgice of a pressure profile plot has been

Figure 3.2 is the crater profile from Green-

house Easy derived from the contour map of
Fig. 2.2. This crater is fairly uniform and
appears to be reasonably described as a conic
section with a maximum depth of about3 ft,
and a crater width of about 600 ft. Isolated
elevations determined from the survey are
shown as circles on this plot.

Figure 3.3 is the crater profile from Greenhouse George andis fairly regular, considering
the processes of erosion and deposition which
have occurred since shot time. The high ridge

just south of the crater (see Fig. 2.3) is known
to have been filled in by bulldozers in order
to isolate the lake from the lagoon. Similarly,

made partly to emphasize this fact. From the
relative uniformity of the crater at distances
beyond 1000 ft, it seems fairly clear that the
deep hole is a result of geologic structure. In

fact, the 120-ft depth at Ground Zerois influ-

enced to some extent because it lies on the
flank of the sink hole. In the absence of this
structural weakness, the Mike crater may have
been no more than 110 ft instead of the present

depth of 120 ft at Ground Zero.
3.2

SIZE AND SHAPE IN CRATER SCALING

In this section the results in Figs. 3.1 to 3.4
are correlated to give a genera! description for

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