Meteor Crater

Even the best laid plans are executed imperfectly. I managed to forget my camera battery charger and battery I was charging in the hotel room back in Winslow. So, once I finished at the Grand Canyon, I reversed course and went back to the hotel to fetch the forgotten items. Along the way I realized that I was now easy to stop for a look about at Meteor Crater.

The crater was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, when the local climate on the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper.^[15][16] The area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by mammoths and giant ground sloths.^[17][18]

The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 160 ft (50 m) across. The speed of the impact has been a subject of some debate. Modeling initially suggested that the meteorite struck at up to 45,000 mph (20 km/s), but more recent research suggests the impact was substantially slower, at 29,000 mph (12.8 km/s). About half of the impactor's bulk is believed to have been vaporized during its descent through the atmosphere.^[19] Impact energy has been estimated at 10 megatons TNT_e. The meteorite was mostly vaporized upon impact, leaving few remains in the crater.^[20](wikipedia)

This is not a national monument since it still privately owned by the Barringer family. Although some refer to it as the Barringer Crater, the US Board on Geographic names took the name from the closest post office named, fittingly, Meteor.

Meteor Crater lies at an elevation of 5,640 ft (1,719 m) above sea level.^[9] It is about 3,900 ft (1,200 m) in diameter, some 560 ft (170 m) deep, and is surrounded by a rim that rises 148 ft (45 m) above the surrounding plains. The center of the crater is filled with 690–790 ft (210–240 m) of rubble lying above crater bedrock.^[1] One of the interesting features of the crater is its squared-off outline, believed to be caused by existing regional jointing (cracks) in the strata at the impact site.^[10]