Canyon Diablo and Meteor Crater
The first crater on Earth proved to have been made by a meteorite.
About 50,000 years ago, an iron meteoroid perhaps 50 m across hit the plains of northern Arizona and blasted out a crater about 1.2 km wide and 170 m deep. Estimates of the energy released range from about 2.5 to more than 10 megatons of TNT.
Thousands of iron fragments, named Canyon Diablo, are scattered around the crater. In 1903 the mining engineer Daniel Barringer claimed the crater was made by an impact and spent years drilling for a buried iron mass that was never there, because most of the meteorite had vaporised. In 1960 the geologist Eugene Shoemaker found coesite, a mineral formed only under extreme shock, proving the impact origin.
Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, is the best-preserved impact crater on Earth and was used to train Apollo astronauts.
In the catalogue
- Canyon Diablo Iron, IAB-MG, United States, 1891 · 30 t