METEOR CRATER

Apart from astronomy, it is impossible to ignore this famous meteoritic crater located about 60 km east of Flagstaff, very familiar with amateur astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts. Formerly known as Canyon Diablo (it's also under the name of small, fervical meteorites for sale throughout specialized stores, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world), this crater is quite impressive with 1,300 m diameter for 190 m in depth, formed around 50,000 m. 000 years after the fall of a 50 m diameter meteorite weighing around 300,000 tons (a beautiful baby… we imagine the damage she had to do by falling at the speed of 40,000 km/h!) The energy released at the time of spraying the asterisk and part of the ground at this place was colossal (the equivalent of 160 Hiroshima atomic bombs!). 50,000 years later, especially from the nineteenth century, men tried to understand the mystery of its origin (volcanic?), before Daniel Moreau Barringer, mine engineer, suggested in 1903 the extraterrestrial origin of geological formation! Therefore, the operation of the site and the properly organized excavations allowed a large quantity of meteorites, sometimes of good size, to be harvested with the classic ferrous profile, the mixture of iron and nickel called the arch.

It is first the outside walls of the crater that you can see when you arrive by car, incorrectly imagining that this is a small, long mount formed in the desert. On the spot, the inevitable shop at the entrance is full of babioles to buy, priority meteorites and other derived rocks, impactites, tectites, impact gaps. Then comes the moment to go out and point his nose towards the crater from the obligatory bridge. Let us be frank: if the visit will of course interest the enthusiast, it will be much less the case for the unwarned who will see in this place "a simple hole in the desert"! A very reductive qualifier, but reinforced by the fact that we cannot go around the crater or descend into its center. Good and frustrating. On the road to Petrified Forest National Park a few hours later, this stop at Meteor Crater is still very nice.