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Meteor Crater - Part 5 of 6

The National Geographic Magazine, June 1928, pp. 720-730:

The Mysterious Tomb Of A Giant Meteorite (by William D. Boutwell)

The Drill Is Lost At 1,376 Feet

Once the drill was recovered, the hunt for the iron mass began again. At
1,000 feet evidences of iron stain began to show. At 1,200 feet the
drill went through powdered iron like that found around rusted
meteorites discovered in the near-by desert. By the time the boring
reached 1,300 feet the sludge often showed 50 per cent nickel-iron.
On August 11, 1922, at 1,376 feet the drill lodged in something hard and
solid. It would not budge. Drillers tried all the tricks of oil-field
fishing on the tool. Dynamite was exploded deep in the hole. All to no
avail. The working had to be abandoned. Probably the goal of 18 years'
effort was attained. But the condition of the iron and the amount of it
there remain a mystery.
Although thousands of pioneers passed over the Santa Fe Trail within a
few miles of Meteor Crater, the uniqueness of this world wonder escaped
notice until Grove Karl Gilbert, the geologist, suggested the meteorite
theory in 1895. Scientists were at first loath to believe that a
meteorite blasted the crater. No other meteorite has been known to
penetrate more than 11 feet in the ground. Most of them go no farther
than a few inches, owing to their small size. In Norway one hit a frozen
lake and bounced along without breaking the ice. In Sweden another
fragment bounded on a housewife's washing without tearing or scorching
the linen.
While Meteor Crater has no brothers on the face of the earth, probably
there are thousands of similarly blasted craters within sight of
everyone. That is a paradox which can only be explained with a
telescope. Some bright moonlight night look at the man in the moon
through a telescope and you will find that his shining face is badly
pockmarked. More than 30,000 craters have been counted on the hemisphere
which the moon turns constantly toward the earth. There is very strong
support for the belief that all of them, like Meteor Crater, are tombs
of meteorites. They may record far greater impacts than Meteor Crater.
One of the largest is Copernicus, 55 miles across.
The pitted face of the moon may be a model of what the earth once looked
like, and perhaps what the earth might look like to-day had it, like the
moon, no atmosphere to serve as a protective cushion.
Since the moon has no atmosphere and no rainfall, it has no protection
and no erosion; so it has been unable to, cover up the scars of
celestial battering. Our sun and planetary system, physicists believe,
were born out of the wreckage of an older system. Mars, Jupiter, the
earth and all the rest are supposed to be picking up fragments of that
ancient system in the form of meteorites. Of course, the chief
accretions came when the planets were young; so it is assumed that the
moon's meteorite scars are very old indeed. On our planet, sediments,
rock upheavals, sinkings, and weathering have smoothed out any pits.
Evidence of tremendous shock is everywhere to be found in and around
Meteor Crater. Nothing is more eloquent of collision than the tons upon
tons of fine white sand in and out of the crater. On the slopes it seems
to have flowed like wheat in a grain elevator. This rock flour, almost
as soft and fine to the fingers as talc, will pass a two-hundred-mesh
screen. A microscope shows the grains to be shattered bits of larger
pieces. In the powder have been found quartz grains of the sandstone
still whole, but cracked through and through by shock. If the pressure
of a penknife blade is brought down upon the grain it breaks into pieces
identical with the bits of rock flour.

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