Meteor Crater - The World's Best Preserved Asteroid Impact Crater 

I've been there. It seemed the meteor had hit in a very convenient location for tourists, so close to a major highway.

That is a Randall Carlson joke if im not mistaken..

🤣🤣🤣

Heard a few dinosaurs got killed. 😄

That's funny

ROTFL

Never mind that, what about the visitor center WHICH ONLY BARELY SURVIVED.

I wonder if anyone had a dashcam by then.. Or instant bird photography..

Saw the Crater from the air flying out of Winslow. That desert is green.!

But fortunately it hit the crater instead, huge luck!

the scientific term is "a-hole"

A tower on a mountaintop is an artificial hole inside a natural hole...in the atmosphere.

@@JarrodFrates A boat is a hole in the water you fill with money.

It's just lucky that mine shaft was there for the meteor to land in otherwise all the fish at the bottom of the crater would have died when it landed in it. And how about the sheer luck of that visitor center?? To be that close when they moved the crater away from the highway and it didn't fall in. Talk about dropping a business out of the sky.

Our company once built a 300ft deep brick well. The client was really annoyed, went up to the bricklaying foreman, took the section drawing from him, turned it the right way up and asked him when the chimney would be finished. It's as true as I'm riding this bike, missus!

What a nice thing to do

Kickass pilot right there.

I'm guessing this is back when you could smoke on planes, and seatbelts in cars were optional? :D

@@secularmonk5176 no- it was around 1994. And then, in 97 I was flying an air Alaska flight from Portland to San Diego and that pilot did the same thing when we flew directly over Yosemite valley…Tipped the plane into about a 20 degree bank left and right so you could look right down on top of Half Dome. Although, in 1999 I Was flying back from Italy, where I had bought a bunch of very hard to find sculpture tools and put them in my check in. Among them was 7 mold knives. Big 12” long knives with 6” of razor sharp blade. As I was passing thru the x-ray for my connecting flight at Heathrow the operator stopped my bag and the security agent asked me, “Pardon me, sir, but do you have any metal articles in your bag?” To which I replied, “why, yes, there are seven large knives in that bag, about yay long” holding my hands up about a foot apart. The guy looked squintingly at the screen and I saw his mouth moving, as if counting under his breath. Then he said, “Right you are…” and handed me my bag and they let me board the plane. Almost exactly 2 years later I got stuck in China on 9/11, and it took nearly a month to get a flight home. Finally got a flight and they searched every bag and they pulled out my fingernail clippers and told me I could not carry those on the plane. I looked at the security guard and asked him, “ you mean to tell me that your flight crew is such a bunch of wimps that they might let someone take over a plane with a fingernail clipper?” In that moment I remembered ironically how the British security guy had let me on a plane with seven huge knives, solely because I had honestly told him exactly how many I had.

@@christopherpardell4418 Thanks for sharing!

Thank you! I'd always wondered about that.

Me too when he showed the aerial view of it I saw it look like a square with rounded corners I thought it would be a perfect circle!

Cool info, I had wondered about that shape

As well as block cleavage of underlying sandstone strata.

1:41 4:07

Come on, where’s your sense of adventure? 😉

@@ELCADAROSA It died of old age a few years ago. :)

It'll be a great story for the grandkids

@@ELCADAROSA I know imagine having to tell your grandkids about going to school barefoot in the snow up hill both ways while dodging asteroids

ah come on, why wouldnt you want to see a radio telescope being built in it

What is the point of being guided around the rim but not let all the way in???

@@voidremoved so tourist dont trample and litter the place

@@voidremoved It is the best perserved impact crater in the world. If it was open for tourists it would cease to be that. The fact that it is left to science is a great thing!

@@voidremoved I ask my wife this exact question pretty much every night.

@@Skinflaps_Meatslapper wow, it must be bewildering being so close to something so beautiful and never being inside. trust me, it's not as good as you'd expect, but it's nice to say "i've been in there!".

That echoes my visit there as well. Very rude staff. Shame, really. I guess you have to be VIP.

Sounds like there's a bunch of assholes there

Just goes to show how realistic computer models are...

I was there this spring. The tour guide made the joke that if humanity went extinct and then an alien civilization came here and studied the ruins they would find a crater and at the bottom of the crater deep underneath they would find the Cessna aircraft that would appear like that is what crashed and made the impact

I did the same about four weeks ago. Saw the admission price and headed back to I-40!

Same, but more like 20 years ago. My parents and sister and me were driving to visit family in California and when I saw the sign I asked if we could stop by. I'd always been a huge science buff as a kid, so I was excited we were going to be so close. My dad also thought it'd be cool so we dropped by for a few hours. :) Glad I got to see it in person.

Saw it in 2007...was on way back home from California. Worth seeing....Grand Canyon is not very far away either. 😁👍

Petrified Forest is also in that area. Worth visiting too.

Same happened to my ex-gf and me when we were on a road-trip back in 2017. Bought a small fragment of the meteor too. Definitely worth a visit.

I did the same, unannounced to my codriver. amazing

I was a tour guide there 20 years ago. That was pert of our standard routine.

@@-oiiio-3993 Nice! Do you have an idea how much it weighs ?

@@arantes6 1 cubic meter of Iron is 7.87 tonne, how big is it you guess?

This is a lie. The Barringer Family bought the rights to the crater and never found a meteorite. Do some research. This is why it is called Barringer Crater. The Family lost a fortune. And heat does not come from the Sun; and no such thing as river rock. Learn how to recognize the truth.

@@TheBlueScarecrow 5:37

He did a video on this 5 years ago, except in full 360 / VR. Dunno why he's acting like this is new.

@@KCzz15 He spoke of his previous visit. Were you listening, to make a charge like that? And you're editing so whatever I spoke to is subject to revisionist history.

@@Bill_Woo He said he visited previously, he didn't say he filmed the entire thing in 360 / VR and put it on his channel. My comment stands.

@@KCzz15 It stands in edited state. And no, you weren't listening, until after I commented. But you're very good at refusing surrender.

@@Bill_Woo What are you on about? Because I fixed a typo in my original comment 30 seconds after I'd posted it, it's invalid?

Ditto! Made a planned detour on a road trip from Texas to Vegas to stop by Meteor Crater. Can't recommend it enough!

Like your recommendation here, Dave. Still don't like your review of the PICkit 3. ;)

cool only 12 hours flight for me...

😒Don’t be scammed😒 It’s boring & a waste of time.🤢🤮 - It takes long to get there. - It’s extremely hot most of the year. - They won’t allow you to get down into it. 🤦‍♂️ - If they smart enough they would have open during the night & offer tours during full-moon days down into the creator, & star gazing during the rest of the month.

The day we stopped by, the guided walking tour along the rim was very informative and well paced, led by an experienced docent who made sure everyone in our small group had a good visit, with all our questions answered. The history museum and tour are a great investment for parents and kids who love space exploration, natural history and need a break from driving to stretch your legs and open your mind.

Great idea! I was thinking an elevator shaft under the visitor center, but the ski lift would give you an excellent view as you descend and return, and prevent any damage to the crater itself.

I was under the impression that they limit the number of people who can go down there in order to preserve the crater.

At ~50m it would still be a very large model.

"Coneniently close"?? This is so American - it looks to be about 150km away! It's like saying that Birmingham is conveniently close to London, if you're visiting... We're hoping to visit the States in 2023 and the Grand Canyon is (of course) on our list of places to see. When I read your post, I thought "great - we can pop down the road and see Meteor Crater too!"

@@paulhaynes8045 It's all relative. Distances between cities in the American Southwest are vast. When I distributed Sparkletts water in Northern AZ my route was larger than some European countries.

If you're staying in Flagstaff, just make it part of a day trip. 🥳 Popped onto the access road (was actually on a road trip to Winslow) & found out about the entrance fee. It's, um, not $0.25 anymore. 😳 Turned right around and kept on a chuggin'.

@@paulhaynes8045 150km is nothing.

@@svenmorgenstern9506 No it's not, but it's still well worth it.

😀

With the cartoon shape or the original curved shape?

@@johndododoe1411 Doesn't matter, as long as you have a Stan Lee cardboard cut-out visible from the visitors center binoculars, getting ready to lift Thor's Hammer...

There've been 49 millennia of dust blowing out, too!

This is why the Earth’s surface is not covered with craters, the same way the Moon’s is. They’re in similar orbits, they would have been hit (and are still being hit) with similar densities of random objects. Erosion/deposition on the Earth tends to wipe out the traces in (geologically) short order.

mmmmmm meteor burger! what a genius✌️😎👌

When I worked at MC 20 years ago I suggested a taco bowl type salad (in fried tortilla) as a 'Crater Salad' and a version with chunks of meat as the 'Meatier Crater '. No one would listen.

You serve coffee at 98°C in a cup that softens dramatically when heated to 95°C and you get sued for massive damages, and here you're suggesting serving a burger at twice the boiling point of iron?

@@Sableagle As long as it hits the plate at sufficient speed most of it will vaporize.

@@-oiiio-3993 love the ideas!!! shame some people just don't listen

Large areas of solids act like fluids when violently disturbed. It's pretty cool.

@@questioneverything4633 yes!! A recent crater, well preserved.

Not an uncommon thing. At very high pressures and velocities, tensile strength of materials is very low in comparison to inertia.

Yes, it's really cool driving through the rings the road cuts through as you approach the crater.

There is a crater in Bikini atoll that's one third larger but about half as deep as Meteor Crater, but it is a nuclear explosion crater created by the detonation of a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb at ground level. The blast sent out supersonic shock waves that nearly capsized and sunk a ship there to observe that explosion 23 miles away from ground zero. It's a good bet the impact that created Meteor Crater created a similar thermal pulse and blast effects, but no radioactive fallout unlike the Castle Bravo test that drenched the area in radiation that was enough to inflict a lethal dose in minutes.

@@taraswertelecki3786 the difference between a nuclear explosion and a meteor impact is the ratio of thermal energy and blast energy in a nuclear explosion the thermal to blast energy ration is 5/3 but on a meteor impact blast energy is significantly higher

@@prashantsinghsisodia6709 That matters little if you are near ground zero for either one.

The crater lies at about 5,600 ft above sea level and has a depth of around 560 ft. Someone who lives near sea level and has not acclimated to the elevation could find it challenging to hike from the bottom to the rim, even if they're in good physical shape. I wonder how many "drag-outs" they had to provide to out-of-shape visitors who hiked to the bottom, but then found they didn't have the stamina to hike up to the rim again. Maybe that's why they don't allow hikers into the crater anymore.

@@Milosz_Ostrow Yeah I think insurance was a bit more ok with just posting 'at your own risk' back then as well. We didn't have the lawsuits etc then like we do now.

T'wasn't John Glenn. His entire mission was daytime in '61. Perhaps one of the later Mercury missions or if in '65 or '66, it was a Gemini mission.

@@TheBudhenson It was John Glenn, he made 3 orbits and it passed overhead (Marion Indiana) in the afternoon or early evening. Yuri was the first to orbit in 1961, from Soviet Union and made a single orbit. I saw the crater in AZ in 1964.

O ffs, evribody is making the joke I was about to make, juust grate.

Yes, by 50,000 years!

The dinosaurs might have a bone to pick with it

Now try to picture it next to the Chicxulub impact crater that is about 150 km in diameter.

Pan from 10:13 too. Needs some cows or sheep, or lifesize models to provide scale.

Yes! This!!!

Perhaps an even larger crater on the Moon could be an extremely large telescope?

It's on fault lines, so that'd be dangerous.

There's an interesting bit of physics involved in bullets hitting steel: melting by velocity! When you heat a steel plate, the atoms vibrate in place faster and faster, being pushed back into place by the forces between them that maintain the matrix and thus the solidity of the steel. The hotter it gets, the faster they move, the farther they go and the more they push each other apart, so the steel expands, but it stays solid. Get it hot enough, though, and the amount of extra force required to nudge the atoms past each other gets small enough to allow you to forge steel bars into sword blades. A little hotter than that, and the atoms are moving fast enough to go past each other and break free of the matrix, a process we call melting. When a bullet hits a steel plate, if it's going fast enough, it pushes on the atoms that are exactly in its way and gets them moving fast enough relative to the rest of the plate for them to behave as if liquid. Below that critical velocity, you get the lead of the bullet acting like a liquid and splashing beautifully over the solid steel surface, like a water balloon dropped on a steel cargo lift, turning back to solid itself as soon as it's no longer impacting. Above that velocity, it's like a bucket of water thrown through one of those decorative sheet-of-water waterfalls you get in hotels, and you get a beautifully polished cylindrical hole through the plate. Of course, there's a nasty possibility if the bullet's short and the plate's thick: the bullet starts off "melting" the plate but slows down too much to continue doing so before it can get all the way through, leaving a crater like a meteor impact transient crater that splashes the remains of the bullet right back at the shooter. Not a problem shooting at thin mild steel or hardened steel from 600 m, but a real issue shooting thick slabs of mild steel at short range. Safety goggles highly recommended.

I think it's so cool and I hope I get to visit s8me day. I think it's just so crazy that of all places a meteor could land it landed in a crater like that. Imagine if it had landed on a highway or an airport.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a let down that you can't go down, but it's cool none the less.

The Great Sand Dunes National Park is also worth a visit.

You know, meteors usually hits the middle of the crater, so the visitor center was safe.

Yes but the gift shop sustained heavy damage.

Great book! My little chunk of iron space debris landed in Toluca, Mexico in 1776. It's the oldest object anyone can ever touch, older even than the earth. And I just picked up a small Chelyabinsk. I treasure these objects.

Too bad you didn't take one of my tours. I had the pleasure of guiding one with Carolyn Shoemaker (recently R.I.P.) and some of her students in 2000 or early '01. Carolyn was a gem. Gene had passed on a few years prior.

That region of the country is typically very windy. It is the lower, drier and warmer section of the Rocky Mountains. There is frequently a 50°F temperature difference and at times even as much as 80°F difference between within 100 miles. I used to drive a truck across I-40; and the winds get bad enough the highway is closed for long stretches for a few days at a time. The road is closed more for wind than snow.

Interesting tidbit it's actually colder at the bottom

@@hewhohasnoidentity4377 oh yeah and there's no buffers at all, just flat land for miles and miles.

@@hewhohasnoidentity4377 The Rockies? Arizona is not part of the Rocky Mountains, and the crater is over a hundred miles from the New Mexico border. Way, way off.

There's a railway station near my hometown which is built from sandstone. If you're a geologist and you want to see the type (reference) specimen of the rock, textbooks advise going to the railway station, not to any outcrop. I always found that very amusing, though, it probably isn't to others.

I was a tour guide there 20 years ago and it never ceased to impress me.

Walnut canyon is pretty cool too.

There's a volcano east of Winslow that can be visited, too, with lava bubbles to see and an open lava tube that faces north and therefore serves as a natural freezer, slowly filling itself with ice as well as the trail up to the crater rim. I still remember the little guide leaflet: "This is one of many lightning-blasted trees that can be seen along the trail, as the lava is rich in iron and attracts lightning." The first bolt of that day's lightning storm was behind me on my right, close enough for me to smell it, while I was standing on the rim of the crater, and another happened about 30 paces in front of me while I was on my way back down. It's quite possible that the can of Dr Pepper I spotted on the way back down saved my life, because I stopped running to pick that up and drink it just a few seconds before that bolt.

Nature: “Come talk to me when you can match the Chicxulub Impacter (12-18 million Megatons)!”

Sorry but it’s “brrrrrrt”

There are actually theoretical weapons that consist of steering asteroids towards Earth. Apart from the propulsion issues, these would have unacceptable accuracy problems.

@@MrX21B yeah no its thump

@@marc-andreservant201 This is where AI comes in

Good observation. It is squarish.

It’s square because of erosion.

@@XJapa1n09 If it started as a round hole it would have eroded to a round hole. All four sides would not have eroded to straight. Maybe one of them might have but all 4?I don't think so.

@@rickyredd3131 Not necessary, erosion depends on the composition of the materials around. Than again, it could have started of being not perfectly circular. Edit. There’s also factors like prevailing wind direction and how water flows in the area.

I read something about it hitting between 2 fault lines

Honeymoon, eh? Soooo...did you? Like, right on the edge? lol.

If he was lucky he had 2 rimshots that day/night

the meteor was not moving, it was the Earth that hit the meteor.

That was a walking beam 'on loan' from the Santa Fe Railroad which was _very_ interested in Barringer's iron / nickel mining enterprise.

@@-oiiio-3993 There actually are remnants of a drilling rig. DMB was my great grandfather and I've seen the parts many times.

@@GaragebandandBeyond I've been to the rig on the southern rim of the crater as well. I was a tour guide at MC two decades ago. There's also the 'bag house' on the western side, left over from a venture which used the high grade silica sand for optical glass production. The Barringers also once held significant interest in Peerless Motors which was one of the prestigious 'three p's' along with Pierce Arrow and Packard.

@@-oiiio-3993 If you were working there two years ago we have met! FYI This is Lewin Barringer.

​@@GaragebandandBeyond It was two _decades_ ago and I believe we have. I was the only guide for a time when Eduardo had left in a huff.

There was an article in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage about that last year. They're not actual oral traditions, but rather appropriations changed for use in drumming up financial support for the iron mining venture. Listen to the locals, not the modern reinvention of what they had to say no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.

That plane was fast as hell 🤣 They must have been so smart back in the days.

"And _this,_ dear spawn, is an example of the sort of self-destructive behaviour that eventually led to the extinction of the primates and created the niche in the land-based ecology that allowed _us_ to emerge from the seas and become the dominant species on this planet. Well, this, war, global warming and that anti-vax nonsense, but seriously, this."

They don’t let you go in? Not that I’d want to climb back up, but hey, what good is nature if we can’t enjoy it?

@@alphagt62 A family member used to work there. They used to do tours inside until they started getting lawsuits from people spraining or breaking ankles. Then they had to shut it down. Unfortunate.

@@tylerandes4483 Quite true.

Sniff... just beuuuuuteeful.

For me it was a mystical, almost spiritual experience. Begrudgingly worth $20.00.

You're more than welcome to purchase the crater and donate it the National Parks Service.

I believe the family offered it before it became so famous, and the US gov’t said “no”.

used to be called Barringer Meteor Crater.....