[meteorite-list] Arizona Meteor Crater Holds Deep Fascination

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Apr 5 16:23:26 2006
Message-ID: <200604051842.k35Igel29077_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."
Received on Wed 05 Apr 2006 02:42:40 PM PDT