Daniel Moreau Barringer
The mining engineer who spent 26 years and a fortune trying to prove, correctly, that Meteor Crater was made by a falling meteorite.
Key facts
- Born
- 1860
- Died
- 1929
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Mining engineer and geologist
Daniel Moreau Barringer trained as a lawyer and geologist and made his money from a silver mine in Arizona. In 1902 he heard about the crater near Canyon Diablo and the iron meteorites scattered around it. He became convinced that a giant iron meteorite lay buried beneath the crater floor, and that it might be worth a great deal as a source of nickel and iron.
In 1903 Barringer and a partner formed a company and obtained mining rights to the land. In 1905 and 1906 he and the physicist Benjamin Chew Tilghman published papers setting out the evidence that the crater had been made by an impact: the layers of rock in the rim were turned up and even flipped over, crushed silica lay in the crater floor, and meteoritic iron was mixed into the debris thrown out.
He drilled and dug for decades, but found no great buried mass. In 1929 the astronomer Forest Ray Moulton calculated that a meteorite striking at such speed would be almost entirely vaporised in the explosion, so there was no buried treasure. Barringer died of a heart attack a few weeks later.
His central claim was right, and in the 1960s Eugene Shoemaker proved it beyond doubt. Meteor Crater is now often called Barringer Crater, and it is still owned by his family's company. The Meteoritical Society awards a Barringer Medal for work on impact craters.
On the timeline
- December 1905Barringer makes the case for an impact
- 1929Moulton shows the Meteor Crater iron vaporised
See more
The Canyon Diablo meteoriteBarringer Crater (Meteor Crater) crater