Meteor Crater

Suddenly there was a blinding flash as a giant fireball roared out of the sky and struck the earth with a tremendous explosion. The ground shook for hundreds of miles in every direction and not a living thing was left amidst the awful devastation.

No, this is not something out of Astonishing Science Fiction Magazine. It actually happened in Arizona. Whether it was a gigantic meteor, a compact shower of meteorites, or the head of a comet, no one knows. But something big and solid from outer space collided with the earth and left an immense hole in the ground that you can see today.

Called Meteor Crater, this unique legacy from one of the world's greatest cataclysms is located twenty miles west of Winslow and is easily reached by a 5-mile paved side road south from U.S. Highway 66. Dominating a tawny, barren sweep of desert, the nearly circular pit is 4,100 feet across and 570 feet deep, with a rim rising 100 to 150 feet above its surroundings. From the air the crater is as prominent as an ink spot on a tablecloth, but travelers on the highway see it merely as a low, flat-topped butte in the distance. From there it doesn't look very impressive and many pass it by. But if you take the time to visit the rim you will discover that Meteor Crater is an outstanding natural wonder, literally out of this world, and several geologists have even called it the most interesting place on earth.

No human was around when this great gash was made, as the meteorite, or whatever it was, is estimated to have fallen some 50,000 years ago. However, as the crater is by far the largest example of its kind known, it has long been the subject of scientific speculation. Savants with slide rules and adding machines have come up with some amazing figures to account for a hole of such mammoth dimensions. The errant celestial body, they say, must have weighed between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 tons, struck the earth at a speed of 180,000 miles an hour, threw out 300,000,000 to 400,000,000 tons of rock, and buried itself 1,500 feet below its crater. These statistics are hard to grasp, but they do indicate that our biggest hydrogen bombs are mere children's firecrackers in comparison to this monster projectile from the skies.

However, as you turn off the highway and head for Meteor Crater, there are now no signs of an ancient convulsion of Nature on such a stupendous scale. The empty desert stretches away, quiet and peaceful, to the long green line of pine forests on the Coconino Plateau and the snow-spotted San Francisco Peaks, rising grandly in the west. Not until you drive the last half mile up to the rim do you begin to notice that something big must have happened. All about are evidences of terrific impact. The outer slopes are littered with crushed and pulverized rock, while blocks and fragments of all sizes are scattered everywhere. Some of these shattered rocks, blasted and hurtled out of the ground by the explosion, have astonishing proportions. There is one that stands on end, seventeen feet high, and another that is estimated to weigh more than 7,000 tons. The meteorite, too, suffered from the collision, for within a 6-mile radius of the crater more meteoric iron has been picked up than in all the rest of the world put together.

But nothing quite prepares you for the surprise of your first look into the crater. It seems impossible that there are forces powerful enough to blast such a huge cavity out of solid rock in a matter of a few seconds. In shape the pit is almost a perfect bowl of enormous size. The ragged circular cliffs rimming it drop away almost vertically vertically for three hundred feet to gentler slopes of broken rock and sand, which curve down to the bottom. No vegetation softens the naked walls and they gleam brown, red, yellow and grey in the brilliant Southwestern sun. The effect is as if you were looking into one of the stark, dead craters that pockmark the surface of the moon. Vast, silent and enigmatic is this mysterious tomb of a giant meteorite and it inspires a feeling of awe. But the very wonder of it stimulates curiosity and you are soon asking how it all happened. Fortunately, most of your questions can be answered on the spot. For right on the rim is the Museum of the Barringer Meteorite Crater. Here, in a neat, modern-style building, the story is told in a ten-minute recorded lecture, graphically supplemented by pictures, charts, sections and rock specimens. Mr. George E. Foster, the museum's curator, is on hand, too, to explain the exhibits and answer questions. Odds are that you can't stump him either, for probably every question relating to the crater has already been asked by somebody. There is also another interesting museum devoted to meteorites at Sedona on U.S. Highway 89A, south of Flagstaff. Its owner and director is Dr. H. H. Nininger, who lived near the crater for many years and wrote a book about meteors.

Both these specialists will tell you that solid bodies wandering the vast reaches of our solar system are so common that they will probably present a major hazard to the navigation of space ships in the future. Perhaps the hundreds of thousands of craters on the moon were caused by collisions with these far traveling bodies. Not counting telescopic meteors, of which there must be tens of millions, about twenty million enter the earth's atmosphere every twenty-four hours. In fact, as many as 200,000 have been seen from one place between midnight and dawn during a meteoric shower. These are mostly small particles, called meteoroids or shooting stars, that are burned up in the intense incandescent heat generated by air resistance. But a few are large enough to survive the dash through our atmosphere and reach the earth's surface. About 365,00o tons of them a year are collected as we sail through space. These are known as meteorites. They vary in size from peas to large rocks weighing as much as sixty tons, and they have been found all over the world. Their chief characteristics are that they consist mostly of nickel and iron, similar to the core of the earth, and are invariably covered with a thin, dull or glossy, black crust, like varnish, the result of white-hot fusion during transit through the atmosphere. There is only one record of a human being hit by one of these missiles from the sky, but they have often crashed through the roofs of houses and damaged buildings.

Meteorites enter the atmosphere traveling seven to forty-five miles a second but, of course, reach the earth at greatly reduced speeds. When seen at night they usually streak across the heavens as brilliant fireballs with bright luminous trains. Often there are visible explosions and loud, thunderous detonations are heard, followed by weird sounds like the bellowing of oxen, roaring of a fire in a chimney, or the ripping of cloth. Scientists believe that the speed of a meteorite is closely related to its origin. The slower ones are tied to our solar system and are probably the debris from long-demolished planets that once circled the sun. But those with velocities above twenty-six miles a second may come from the depths of interstellar space. There is reason to believe that many of these fast travelers are fragments of comets, because showers of meteors almost always accompany their periodic appearance in the heavens. So for many years it was thought that Meteor Crater might be the last resting place of a small comet, head, tail and all. But the buried material seems to be far too dense and solid for that, and present opinion is that it is more likely one of the 50,000odd minor planets.

Some such theory is necessary to explain the crater's unusual size. For nowhere else is there a pit of meteoritic origin approaching its dimensions. Of the world's eleven known examples, Australia's Wolf Creek Crater measures 2,800 feet across and a very old and shallow crater near Odessa, Texas, is 550 feet in diameter. But only two of the others surpass 150 feet. However, Arizona may have to look to its laurels in the future. The mysterious Chubb Crater in the arctic wastes of northern Quebec is certainly not volcanic and it may prove to be the result ofa collision with an even bigger heavenly body. For it is far larger than Meteor Crater. First seen from the air in 1948, Chubb Crater was explored two years later, and was found to be 11,000 feet across and to contain a lake 10,000 feet in diameter. But not a sign of meteoritic iron was seen and the origin of the huge circular pit remains unknown. So Arizona's entry in the crater derby still holds world pre-eminence.

Before the coming of white men, the Indians knew Meteor Crater and endowed it with supernatural significance. But an ancient pit dwelling recently excavated on the rim shows that they apparently never had a superstitious dread of the area. The Hopis today collect the pure white flour of the crushed rock for their intricate religious sand paintings and an old legend of theirs tells that three gods came down from the clouds to live on the desert. One made his home in Meteor Crater and the other two some distance north. Search has been made for additional craters in the belief that these two Hopi "gods" may have been smaller attendant meteorites, but they have not as yet been found. The legend does suggest, though, a more recent origin for Meteor Crater than formerly supposed-perhaps within the past 5,000 years and some geological evidence seems to bear out this view.

Discovery by white men dates from 1871, but the crater was then thought to be a small, dead volcano, like so many of the cinder cones scattered over the Western deserts. Even the United States Geological Survey twenty years later attributed the phenomenon to a gaseous explosion or blowout in the earth's crust. Grove Karl Gilbert, veteran government geologist, was the first to suggest meteoric origin, in 1895, but his announcement failed to make the slightest impression on an apathetic and doubting scientific world.

There the matter rested until a vigorous young geologist and mining engineer from Philadelphia visited the crater in 1903 and became convinced that a large meteorite lay buried beneath it. He was Daniel Moreau Barringer and until his death in 1929 he devoted his life to the crater. It was he who finally convinced the skeptics, and several proposals have been made to name the crater in his honor.

Mr. Barringer filed mineral claims and formed a company to mine the meteoric iron-if he could find it. Drilling began in 1906. A shaft was sunk directly in the center of the crater, where there had been a small lake in bygone days of a more moist climate. You can still see the burned-out ruins of the old shaft house from the rim. At 200 feet quicksand made further operation impossible there and the crater floor was drilled at twenty-seven other points. But iron-stained sand was all that was found. This was a puzzler. Where was the meteorite?

Because the crater is circular, Barringer and other geologists assumed that the meteoric body had crashed straight down out of the sky. However, further study showed that the angle of the affected rock strata varied around the crater. On the north side they were five degrees from the horizontal, while the south was tilted nearly ninety degrees, and the whole southern wall had been lifted vertically about one hundred feet. From this and other evidence, it appeared that the meteorite struck from the north at an angle and had ploughed through the limestone and sandstone layers, and imbedded itself in harder red sandstone under the south wall of the crater. It was Dr. Gilbert, again, who proved with mud balls that an object thrown obliquely will make a circular hole similar to that made by an object descending vertically.

So work was resumed in 1920 with a shaft on the south rim. Torn and shattered rock made drilling difficult and at 300 feet the bit was lost. Fishing for it was unsuccessful, and a 300-foot horizontal tunnel was dug into the crater's inner wall to retrieve it. The drill was recovered in this manner and the work slowly progressed downward. At 1,000 feet iron stains began to show, and 200 feet lower the drill went through pure powdered iron. Further down, the sludge showed up to fifty percent nickel-iron. Everybody was jubilant and success seemed just a matter of days. Then, on August 11, 1922, at 1,376 feet, the bit struck something hard and solid, and stuck fast. No amount of fishing, dynamiting or other tricks of the driller's trade would budge it, and the working finally had to be abandoned. Probably the goal of eighteen years' effort had been attained, but the prize still remained as remote and unattainable as if it lay at the bottom of the sea.

Drilling is expensive, but Mr. Barringer was not discouraged and immediately set to work to raise money for a new shaft. This was sunk a little south of the crater in hopes of avoiding water and quicksand. But groundwater was worse here than in the pit, and three days of pumping were needed for one day of drilling. At 713 feet operations were finally given up. Then the stock market crash of 1929 and Mr. Barringer's sudden death soon afterwards put an end to further large-scale workings, although several more unsuccessful shafts were sunk to depths of 675 feet.

About $1,000,000 has been invested in Meteor Crater and perhaps $2,500,000 more would be needed to develop it into a paying proposition. The property belongs to Mr. Barringer's heirs, organized as the Barringer Crater Company, and geophysical surveys indicate that there is a mass of heavy material, 800 feet under the southwest sector of the pit, 600 feet long, but of undetermined width and depth. Whether further development will be undertaken, no one knows, but at present the crater is operated as a point of interest for the public, with nominal entrance fees to maintain the road, museum and other facilities. New additions at the rim are an observation tower and an Orrery planetarium, which will present the comparative sizes and orbits of the planets. Mr. Barringers' faith in Meteor Crater's mineral resources and his determined efforts to develop them make a saga of private initiative and rugged individualism in the true American tradition. And the abandoned shafts and other workings certainly add to the interest of the 3-mile trail around the rim and the trip to the bottom. On the other hand, Meteor Crater is one of the country's unique possessions, unduplicated elsewhere, and should be preserved in as nearly natural condition as possible. To date, the giant pit remains much as it was originally created, but future large-scale mining operations, either surface or underground, could destroy many of Meteor Crater's intangible values. So Mr. Barringer's heirs do not simply own a piece of private property; they have, in a way, accepted a public trust. For, if Meteor Crater is spoiled or defaced, there isn't anything to take its place.