[meteorite-list] Arizona Meteor Crater Holds Deep Fascination

[Larry Lebofsky]

Hi all:

I caught at least one really big mistake in this article.

Larry

Quoting Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>:

> 
> http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_3673333
> 
> Ariz. meteor crater holds deep fascination
> By Rich Tosches
> Denver Post 
> April 5, 2006
> 
> There is a hole in the ground near this ghost town on the desert
> plateau, a place where the Rocky Mountains become little more than
> small, rocky hills.
> 
> The hole is 550 feet deep and 4,000 feet across. As you stand on the rim
> of the crater and gaze into its red sandstone depths, you can't help but
> imagine that day, once upon a time, when something almost unthinkable
> happened in this place.
> 
> The first known written note about the crater was penned in 1871 by a
> scout for Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
> 
> For decades after word got out, scientists studied the hole. Some
> believed a volcano was the culprit. Others thought it was the work of a
> meteor. (Today, a smaller group clings to a third compelling theory that
> involves baseball star Barry Bonds dropping a dumbbell on his way to
> spring training 200 miles south in Scottsdale.)
> 
> Turns out the meteor theory was the right one. It came, scientists say,
> some 50 million years ago, a 150-foot-wide bundle of iron and nickel
> weighing several hundred thousand tons, burning through the sky and
> slamming into our planet at some 40,000 mph.
> 
> And out here on the dusty land in north-central Arizona where lizards
> now scamper and the occasional jackrabbit races across the sand, woolly
> mammoths died on that very loud day.
> 
> All of which is not lost on Carolyn Sprinkles, who works in the gift
> shop at Meteor Crater and sells, among other things, small packets
> labeled "fossilized dung" for $1.25 each.
> 
> "I walk by that hole out there all the time and I'm always in awe," said
> Sprinkles, who just began her third year working at the tourist
> attraction and living in an RV just down the road from the crater, an RV
> she shares with her husband, who works in the Meteor Crater ticket booth.
> 
> The hole in the ground is owned mostly by the family of the man who
> spent a large chunk of his life down inside the crater. Daniel
> Barringer, a mining engineer from Pennsylvania, became dazzled by the
> site in the early 1900s and spent decades drilling holes in the bottom
> of the crater. He thought he'd find the "great ball of iron" that made
> the depression. He found nothing.
> 
> In 1929, a final drill bit became stuck in the ground at a depth of
> 1,376 feet. Then the drill cable broke. Then Barringer ran out of money.
> And time. He died later that same year.
> 
> Today, the Barringer family has a partnership with the Bar T Bar Ranch,
> a cattle operation that was started here in the 1880s. In 1955, the
> ranch owners formed Meteor Crater Enterprises, Inc.
> 
> Goodbye cows.
> 
> Hello gift shop and ticket booth.
> 
> While most of the meteor that hit at what is officially known as the
> Barrington Meteor Crater vaporized upon impact, many pieces remained.
> The largest known chunk weighs over 1,400 pounds and is on display at
> the Crater Museum, near the gift shop. And before Barrington sealed off
> the area for his drilling work, reports indicated that settlers carted
> off hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons of the meteor's iron.
> 
> Miners, reports indicate, loaded as much as 20 tons of meteor fragments
> onto trains bound for smelting facilities in Texas where it was made
> into tools.
> 
> NASA, which used the Arizona crater to train Apollo astronauts, says the
> hole is the first to ever be positively identified as an impact crater
> and calls it "the best preserved crater on Earth."
> 
> Which makes Carolyn Sprinkles smile. And makes longtime Texas high
> school principal Bill Cranfill proud.
> 
> "I live here at the crater, in one of those apartments right there,"
> said the retired educator, now the manager of the facility, pointing
> across the parking lot to a row of crater housing units where he has
> lived for the past five years. "In the summer we'll get 1,500 people a
> day, seven days a week."
> 
> But this odd place on a remote plateau 40 miles east of Flagstaff is,
> for Cranfill, more than just a tourist site.
> 
> "For five years now, whenever I get a minute," he said, "I stand on the
> rim of that hole. And I just try to imagine what happened that day."
> 
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-- 
Dr. Larry A. Lebofsky
Senior Research Scientist
Co-editor, Meteorite                      "If you give a man a fish,   
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory               you feed him for a day.
1541 East University                       If you teach a man to fish,
University of Arizona                        you feed him for a lifetime."
Tucson, AZ 85721-0063                                     ~Chinese Proverb
Phone:  520-621-6947
FAX:    520-621-8364
e-mail: lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu