Meteor Crater

I’ll admit I haven’t figured out how to describe the location of some places out here in the western states.  Meteor Crater is actually even harder to describe because it is named after Meteor – the post office that was closest to it.  In reality it is actually close to I 40 near Winslow, AZ. The site was formerly known as the Canyon Diablo Crater and fragments of the meteorite are officially called the Canyon Diablo Meteorite. Scientists refer to the crater as Barringer Crater in honor of Daniel Barringer, who was first to suggest that it was produced by meteorite impact.  

The crater is privately owned by the Barringer family through their Barringer Crater Company, and surrounded by the 326,000 acre Bar-T-Bar ranch.  The site is proclaimed to be the "best preserved meteorite crater on Earth" Despite its importance as a geological site, the crater is not protected as a national monument, a status that would require federal ownership. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in November 1967.

Meteor Crater is the spectacular result of a collision that rocked the American Southwest approximately 50,000 years ago. The crater lies at an elevation of about 5,710 ft above sea level. It is about 3,900 ft in diameter, some 560 ft deep, and is surrounded by a rim that rises 148 ft above the surrounding plains. The center of the crater is filled with 690–790 ft of rubble lying above crater bedrock. One of the interesting features of the crater is its squared-off outline, believed to be caused by existing regional cracks in the strata at the impact site.

The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 160 feet across. The speed of the impact was about 29,000 mph (almost 38 times the speed of sound) . It is believed that about half of the meteorites bulk was vaporized during its descent through the atmosphere. Impact energy has been estimated at about 10 megatons. The meteorite was mostly vaporized upon impact, leaving few remains in the crater.
Since the crater's formation, the rim is thought to have lost 50–65 ft of height at the rim crest as a result of natural erosion. Similarly, the basin of the crater is thought to have approximately 100 ft of additional post-impact sedimentation from lake sediments. These erosion processes are the reason that very few remaining craters are visible on Earth, since many have been erased by these geological processes. The relatively young age of Meteor Crater paired with the dry Arizona climate, have allowed this crater to remain almost unchanged since its formation. The minimal erosion that preserved the crater's shape lead to this crater being the first recognized as an impact crater from a natural celestial body.

The crater came to the attention of scientists after American settlers discovered it in the 19th century. They named it the Canyon Diablo crater after Canyon Diablo, Arizona, which was the closest community to the crater in the late 19th century. The crater had initially been ascribed to the actions of a volcano. That was not an unreasonable assumption, as the San Francisco volcanic field lies only about 40 miles to the west.
In 1903, mining engineer and businessman Daniel M. Barringer suggested that the crater had been produced by the impact of a large iron-metallic meteorite. Barringer's company, the Standard Iron Company, staked a mining claim to the land and received a land patent signed by Theodore Roosevelt for 640 acres around the center of the crater in 1903. In 1906, Roosevelt authorized the establishment of a newly named Meteor, Arizona, post office. The closest post office before was 30 miles away in Winslow, Arizona. Standard Iron Company conducted research on the crater's origins between 1903 and 1905. It concluded that the crater had indeed been caused by an impact. Barringer, estimated from the size of the crater that the meteorite had a mass of 100 million tons. Iron ore of the type found at the crater was valued at the time at $125/ton, so Barringer was searching for a lode he believed to be worth more than a billion 1903 dollars.

It was not until 1960 that later research by Eugene Merle Shoemaker confirmed Barringer's hypothesis of a meteor impact. The key discovery was the presence in the crater of rare forms of silica found only where quartz-bearing rocks have been severely shocked by an instantaneous overpressure. The only known mechanism of creating it is naturally through an impact event, or artificially through a nuclear explosion.
Geologists used the nuclear detonation that created the Sedan crater, and other such craters from the era of atmospheric nuclear testing, to establish upper and lower limits on the potential energy of the meteorite.
The impact created an inverted the earth stratification, so that the layers immediately exterior to the rim are stacked in the reverse order to which they normally occur; the impact overturned and inverted the layers to a distance of one to two kilometers outward from the crater's edge.

Because the crater terrain resembles that of the moon it was used for Apollo astronaut training The Astronaut Wall of Fame pays tribute to the brave men and women of America's Space Program.

If you’re looking for a place to stay that The Meteor Crater RV Park is located just off Interstate 40 exit 233, less than a 1/4 mile to the right. The large parking lot includes a Mobil Gas Station and Country Store for checking in. Set up your lawn chairs, look into the night sky from the Meteor Crater RV Park, and enjoy one of the finest star and sky shows offered in the American Southwest.  The campground makes anice base of operations for visiting the other local attractions.