|
Travel
 |
Rendezvous with the Meteor Crater
By
Staff Writer
|
Sedona.biz
(Flagstaff, Arizona): Driving across country from Chicago to Sedona for the
first time it was hard not to be intrigued by a sign I
spotted on Interstate 40 just west of Winslow: “Meteor
Crater—20 Miles.”
I was only vaguely familiar with the
Meteor Crater. In fact my primary knowledge of the
impact site came from the 1984 movie “Starman” with Jeff
Bridges. The Starman and Jenny Hayden (played by Karen
Allen) spend several days traveling from
Wisconsin—pursued by the U.S. Army--to the crater site
for a rendezvous with his mother ship.
 |
Click to
view
Meteor Crater at Google Earth
|
My visit to the Meteor Crater site proved to be
more educational. For example, most people don't know that its
proper name is The Barringer Meteorite Crater. That's
because the crater is an
impact crater formed approximately 50,000 years ago by a
meteorite impact, not a meteor impact. A
meteoroid is a boulder sized piece of space debris. Once
a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and heads toward the
planet’s surface, it begins to vaporize and glow. The vapor trail
is known as a meteor or shooting star. If any piece
of the meteoroid survives the trip through the Earth’s atmosphere
and reaches ground, it is called a meteorite.
Meteor Crater is
approximately 70 miles northeast of Sedona a few miles off
Interstate 40 in the arid Northern Arizona high desert (35 miles
east of Flagstaff and 20 miles west of Winslow). It is hard to image
this dry, rocky landscape 50,000 years ago when it would have been
covered with grasslands and home to wooly mammoths.
The crater impact site is approximately 4,000
feet in diameter and 550 feet
deep, with a circumference of 2.4 miles. The rim of the crater was
forced up by the meteorite impact by about 150 feet. Visitors to the impact site must
walk all the way up to the rim to get a view of the bottom.
It is believed that the meteorite which made
it was composed almost entirely of nickel-iron, was 150 feet across,
weighed roughly 300,000 tons, and was traveling at a speed of 28,600
miles per hour.
The impact of the meteorite was so strong
researchers believe it vaporized the
surrounding area with a force comparable to an atomic blast of 150
Hiroshima bombs. However, the blast was not strong enough to impact
the Earth’s climate so the surrounding area re-vegetated after
the impact.
 |
Daniel Moreau Barringer
(source: meteorite-times.com)
|
The Meteor
Crater is also considered to be the first definitive proof of an
extraterrestrial impact on the Earth’s surface. In 1903 Daniel
Barringer, a mining engineer from Pennsylvania, hypothesized that
the crater was formed by a meteorite due to the iron and silica
traces he found in the crater rim and surrounding areas. Barringer
bought the crater site with the hopes of finding a significant iron
deposit below the surface to mine. At the time it was also
hypothesized by others that the crater was formed by a volcanic
eruption. In the 1960’s Dr. Eugene Shoemaker finally proved that the
layering of minerals found at the impact site could only come from a
meteorite impact, not a volcanic eruption as some had believed.
Many other meteorite impacts on Earth were confirmed afterward.
Today the
Barringer family still owns and operates the crater site. The site
is home to an interactive museum and a variety of outdoor viewing
stations and observation decks. A 1,406 pound meteorite
fragment, the largest ever found in the area, is also on display for
visitors to view and touch. Guided tours of the impact site are
also conducted, leaving hourly from 9:15 a.m. until 2:15 p.m. and
last about 1 hour, weather permitting.
The Meteor Crater Visitor Center is open
daily. Visitation hours are as follows: Memorial Day to
September 15th: 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM; Rest of the year: 8:00 AM to
5:00 PM; Thanksgiving Day: 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Closed
Christmas Day. Admission Prices: Adults: $15.00 -
Seniors (age 60 and older) $13.00 - Juniors (age 6-17) $6.00.
For more information visit:
www.meteorcrater.com.
[Home Page]
[Travel Home Page]
|