[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