RETURN TO INDEX OF ALL ARTICLES • RETURN TO GEOLOGY ARTICLES

GEOLOGY ARTICLE

Barringer Crater in Arizona
by MIKE BALDWIN

06.21.00: Get your daily supply of iron! In 1902, when Daniel Moreau Barringer encountered the crater that now carries his name, he became convinced that his ship had come in and that it had "Old Iron Sides" painted on the bow--even if he was standing in the Arizona desert.

Surrounding the giant hole was an 8 to 10 mile plain scattered liberally with some 30 tons of iron. Unsurprisingly, Barringer assumed that an object that could make a mile wide, 570 foot deep crater with a 150 foot lip must have been pretty darn big, big enough that the residual iron could be collected and sold for a tidy profit. Dutifully, Barringer created the Standard Iron Company and prepared to fill his pockets with gold, er, iron.

Of course, things didn't pan out. When calculating his certain wealth, Barringer failed to remember his high school physics. Given that the object in question had fallen from a rather significant height, it had to be travelling rather quickly--40,000 miles per hour to be more precise. One need only plug this number into Isaac Newton's famous equation which says that "force equals mass times acceleration" (F=MA) to realize that a relatively small meteor would still be big enough to crush Barringer's dreams of wealth, if not his fame.

For more information about this crater, visit http://www.barringercrater.com/
For more fun science facts, visit http://whyfiles.news.wisc.edu/

This information presented for educational purposes under the provisions of the Fair Use Act of 1976.