Meteor Crater & Barringer Space Museum

This was Indy Leo’s favorite excursion on our Arizona trip! Definitely one of the coolest sites I have seen in my lifetime!

Over 50,000 years ago space and earth came together when a huge iron-nickel meteorite, approximately 150 feet wide and weighing several hundred thousand tons, impacted an area outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, with a force 150 times greater than an atomic bomb. The result of this impact was devastation for miles and the creation of the giant bowl-shaped cavity we call Meteor Crater, which measures 550 feet deep and almost a mile wide.
Cited: Meteorcrater.com

The meteorite weighed 300,000 tons and traveled at a speed of 26,000 miles per hour (12 kilometers per second). When it struck the earth in what is now northern Arizona, it exploded with the force of 2 ½ million tons of TNT, or about 150 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Most of the meteorite was melted by the force of the impact and spread across the landscape in a very fine, nearly atomized mist of molten metal. Millions of tons of limestone and sandstone were blasted out of the crater, covering the ground for a mile in every direction with a blanket of shattered, pulverized, and partially melted rock mixed with fragments of meteoritic iron.
cited: Meteorcrater.com

When the dust settled, what remained was a crater three-quarters of a mile (about 1 kilometer) wide and 750 feet deep. The impact occurred during the last ice age, a time when the Arizona landscape was cooler and wetter than it is today. The plain around it was covered with a forest, where mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths grazed. The force of the impact would have leveled the forest for miles around, hurling all life unfortunate enough to be nearby across the plain. Over time, the landscape recovered. A lake formed in the bottom of the crater, and sediments accumulated until the bowl was only 550 feet deep. Then, with the ending of the ice age, the climate changed and dried. The desert that we see today has helped to preserve the crater, by limiting the erosion that might otherwise have blurred or erased the traces of the ancient impact.
cited: Meteorcrater.com

Unfortunately, we were unable to walk the rim of Meteor Crater because the wind was INSANE! For safety reasons, I completely understand. We were, however, able to meander on the viewing decks….you can definitely hear the wind howling in my videos towards the end of this post! To put just how dangerous the wind here can be…..in 1964, two pilots flew over the rim and were sucked into the wind vortex that Meteor Crater creates….they began circling inside the crater in hopes the air would lift them up and out of the vortex (kind of like getting caught in a rip tide….swimming diagonally until the riptide releases you from its grip); the plane stalled and caught fire, crashing into the bottom of the crater. Both pilots miraculously survived (severely injured), but there was no way to get the remains of the plane out of the crater….so the only solution was to drag the remnants and drop them down the mineshaft located at the center of the crater (the mineshaft is a white square in my pictures; I believe you can make it out).

In 1902, Daniel Moreau Barringer, a Philadelphia mining engineer, had become interested in the site as a potential source for mining iron. He later visited the crater and was convinced that it had been formed by the impact of a large iron meteorite. He further assumed that this body was buried beneath the crater floor. Barringer formed the Standard Iron Company and had four placer mining claims filed with the Federal Government, thus obtaining the patents and ownership of the two square miles containing the crater. This was ten years before Arizona became the 48th state.
cited: meteorcrater.com

What he did not know was that the meteorite underwent total disintegration during the impact through vaporization, melting and fragmentation. There was never a single large mass buried beneath the crater. In 1903, Barringer came to Meteor Crater and spent the next 26 years attempting to find what he believed would be the giant iron meteorite. For the next two-and-a-half decades, his work and scientific research were carried on with great perseverance and bitter disappointment.
cited: meteorcrater.com