Skip to main content

Meteor Crater


After we visited the Grand Canyon, we visited Meteor Crater, a ¾ mile wide impact crater in a northern Arizona desert. It is said to be the best-preserved crater in the world.

In this photo, you can see the crater's bumpy rim
on the horizon.
Scientists believe that Meteor Crater was formed 50,000 years ago by a meteorite only 50 meters wide. It blasted such a large crater because it moved at a rate of something between 37 and 60 times the speed of sound. That's very fast. When the meteor hit the ground, it gave off energy equivalent to 10 - 20 million tons of TNT.

The meteorite became extremely hot when it hit. It became so hot that most of it was vaporized, and the rest melted. The ground where it hit was no more fortunate; it vaporized and melted, too. A large quantity of material was thrown away from the site, and rained onto the ground for miles around.

After the impact, fragments of the meteorite that had broken off in mid-air fell out of the sky onto the ground. Due to higher air resistance, they fell at a much lower velocity than the main meteorite, so they survived impact. Some of those fragments are on display in the museum next to the crater.

When we visited Meteor Crater, the wind was very, very strong with nothing out in the flat desert to stop it. At the edge of the crater, the wind was intensified as it blew up and over the rim. The fee was more than we had expected - $16 for adults, $8 for kids. When my mom had visited the crater for the first time many years ago, the fee had only been $1. I didn't want to turn around without viewing the crater, so my mom paid the money and we went in.

The middle observation deck, about ⅔ up the crater wall.
It wasn't as much of a rip-off as we originally thought. Admission to the museum was included, and there was a short movie followed by a presentation. I had planned on going down into the crater, but it was off-limits for reasons of preservation and liability; plus, the sides of the crater were steep, and the wind was blowing very hard. So instead, I satisfied myself with looking through the telescopes on the observation decks.

A mine shaft. You can also see a 6 ft astronaut cutout and flag if you
look closely; those are memorials of NASA's training in the crater.
In the picture to the right, you can see some old equipment and light-colored soil. Here's why it's there: in the early 1900's, Daniel Barringer tried to find the meteorite that had excavated the crater. He thought the meteorite was as large as the crater, and wanted to sell the metal from it. For 27 years he searched by drilling into the ground, but he never found anything worthwhile. The soil, I presume, is from his drilling, and it's probably the same with the equipment.

I find Meteor Crater very impressive; it is the mark left by an event that released an enormous amount of energy all on a small place in an instant, wreaking havoc and destruction. Yet it shows how even the most powerful and significant events can fade and disappear, while everything continues on as if it never happened - the only memory of the disaster being a hole in the ground.

For the next post in the Arizona Road Trip series, go to http://greatmst.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-desert-museum.html
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...
6 comments
Read more

Too Bright, Too Dark

The visible world around us is constantly changing. One second we may have the sun in our eyes, and another we're in a dark closet trying to find the light switch. Such fluctuations in brightness could have ended up being a serious problem for our vision if it weren't for a handy built-in feature: our eyes automatically adapt to the lighting conditions of the surrounding environment. Most people are well aware that their pupils change size to handle lighting conditions. A larger pupil admits more light and makes the scene brighter, while a smaller pupil admits less light and makes the scene dimmer. This mechanism is fast and effective, and is controlled by the brain stem, which acts autonomously - you don't even have to think about it. As useful as this type of adaptation may be, it has some limitations. For example, most artificial lighting is 20 times dimmer than the sun, while pupil dilation only brightens light by a factor of 4 (when compared with a fully constricted pu...
3 comments
Read more

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the ot...
6 comments
Read more