Barringer Crater, also known as Meteor Crater, is a well-preserved impact crater in Arizona, USA. It was created 50,000 years ago by a meteorite that caused an explosion equivalent to 2.5 megatons of TNT. Initially thought to be a volcanic steam explosion, it was recognized as a meteorite impact in the 1950s and definitively proven in 1960.
Barringer Crater, otherwise known as Meteor Crater, is one of the best preserved and largest impact craters on the planet. Located 43 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona, Barringer Crater has a diameter of approximately 1,200 m (4,000 ft), a depth of 170 m (540 ft), and a rim that rises 45 m (150 ft) from the surrounding desert terrain. Inside the crater is approximately 240 m (800 ft) of rubble covering the crater floor.
Probably one of the most famous and visited craters in the world, Barringer Crater was created about 50,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene. At the time, the ground was much wetter and cooler than today, and would have been a grassland occupied by camels, woolly mammoths and giant sloths. A nickel-iron meteorite approximately 50 meters (164 feet) in diameter struck the ground at 12.8 kilometers per second (28,600 mph). When it entered the atmosphere, the bolide was estimated to have had a mass of 300,000 tons, half of which was lost to friction when it reached the surface. The meteor struck the ground at an 80-degree angle, ejecting 175 million tons of rock and producing an explosion equivalent to about 2.5 megatons of TNT, or 150 times more intense than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands of plants and animals in the vicinity would have been instantly vaporized.
Initially thought to have been the result of a volcanic steam explosion, Barringer Crater is the first crater recognized as being from a meteorite impact. In 1903, Daniel Morreau Barringer, a mining engineer and businessman, was the first to suggest the impact theory, which was considered scientifically dubious at the time. Meteorite impacts were thought to be extremely rare. Barringer attempted to unearth the nickel-iron meteorite that created the crater, but failed. Consensus that Barringer Crater was created by a meteorite didn’t fully emerge until the 1950s, as planetary science became more mature. It was only in 1960 that Eugene Shoemaker, the great planetary scientist, found minerals in the crater which definitively proved that it had been caused by a meteorite impact. Since then, many more craters have been discovered around the world.
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