Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

An impact crater is a depressed landform formed by a collision of a cosmogenic projectile to the Earth's surface with a minor decrease of velocity when it falls into the Earth. It has a biological value in that it provides a habitat to animals, plants, and human beings and a scarcity value. We estimated the dimension of Tabun-Khara Crater in south-central Mongolia, based on the methods which can infer the surface and subsurface geometry using DEM. We generated the high-resolution DEM using a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and quantitatively measured its surface geometry(radius). Then, we applied the surface geometry to a series of formulas defining a relationship between the surface and the subsurface geometry and the drilling data by Amgaa and Koeberl(2009) and then decided the final subsurface geometry. As a result, the crater’s diameter is 1.32km, and the maximum depth is 417.8~466.0m. We compared our dimension to other well-defined impact craters on the Earth with similar magnitude. We also compared it with the relationship between lunar impact craters’ surface and subsurface geometry. It proved that our result well matches the relationship defined by the previous research.