Morphological Evolution of Impact Craters and Associated Gravity Anomalies: New Perspectives From Numerical Modeling

Abstract Hyper‐velocity impacts on planetary surfaces lead to impact craters whose morphology evolves due to exogenous factors such as atmospheric processes, as well as endogenous factors including tectonic and metamorphism. On Earth, erosion processes driven by climate (fluvial, aeolian, glacial processes) progressively erase these structures, or even bury them. Nevertheless, the geophysical signature (gravity and magnetic anomalies) of impact structures often remains preserved, even after hundreds of millions of years. In this study, we model the morphological evolution of terrestrial impact craters to infer their associated gravimetric signatures. We explore different models of impact craters evolution in terms of erosion processes and composition of hosted lithologies using a Landscape Evolution Model. Our models account for erosion and sediment displacement by fluvial and hillslope processes, as well as lithospheric flexure. In addition, we compute the gravimetric anomaly disturbance over time. The case of a 30 km diameter complex impact crater is considered and submitted to erosion processes of varying nature and intensity. Our approach explicitly takes into account the physical processes driving erosion and sediment deposition. We observe that, in some cases, the rim‐to‐rim diameter almost doubles, while the amplitude of the negative gravimetric disturbance also increases. However, the extent of this central gravity anomaly is smaller than the apparent crater rim, and better reflects the initial crater diameter. These results offer new perspectives for systematically detecting eroded impact structures and more reliably reconstructing their original dimensions, underscoring the need to integrate topographic and geophysical data in future studies.