Victor A. Gostin (born 1940) is an Australiangeologist, who discovered in theFlinders Ranges ofSouth Australia, a deposit of volcanic material that wasejected from the 300-kilometre distantAcraman crater when theimpact was created by ameteorite some 580 million years ago.[1][2] He is an associate professor at theUniversity of Adelaide, Department of Earth Sciences, School of Physical Sciences.[3]
His discovery was linked to a previous discovery byGeorge Williams, also of the University of Adelaide, that theAcraman crater inLake Acraman was due to the impact of asuperbolide (exceptionally largemeteor). After Gostin learned about this, he, Williams, Peter Haines and other colleagues of the University of Adelaide studied the materials in both places and found that they were similar inlithology and fracturing, showing that the ejecta in the Flinders Ranges came from the Lake Acraman site.[4] This collaborative study was announced by them on 9 July 1985 during the AdelaideGeosyncline Informal ResearchSymposium in the Department of Geology and Geophysics,University of Adelaide. Gostin remarked that his discovery "was the first known occurrence of far-flung ejected blocks of impact origin that have been preserved on earth."[5]
Main-belt asteroid3640 Gostin,[6] which was named in honor of Gostin, was discovered byCarolyn andEugene Shoemaker at thePalomar Observatory. The citation reads as follows:[1]
Named in honour of Victor A. Gostin, geologist on the faculty of the University of Adelaide, South Australia. A specialist in sedimentology and stratigraphy, Gostin discovered in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia a deposit of shocked debris ejected from the Lake Acraman impact structure about 300 km to the west. His careful studies of this ancient deposit have provided the first detailed picture of the distant ejecta from a known large terrestrial impact crater.
In 2011, Gostin was also awarded the Bruce Webb Medal of the SA Division of theGeological Society of Australia[7] for "his major contributions to Earth Sciences education and various aspects of geology, includingenvironmental geology,marine geology,planetology andsedimentology over the last forty years."
Gostin is an active member of theTheosophical Society in Australia and edits thee-newsletterTheosophy and Science.
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