Meteor Crater

Meteor Crater was formed approximately 50,000 years ago by a nickel-iron meteorite impact. First scientifically described in 1891, it became the subject of decades of debate between volcanic and impact origin theories. Eugene Shoemaker's 1960 proof of impact origin established the field of impact cratering science. The site was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967 and has been recognized as an IUGS Geoheritage Site.

The Canyon Diablo meteorite was a fragment of an asteroid, composed primarily of iron and nickel, roughly 50 meters in diameter. It had been orbiting the sun for perhaps four billion years. Approximately 50,000 years ago, its orbit intersected with Earth's. It entered the atmosphere at roughly 12.8 kilometers per second — about 28,600 miles per hour — and struck the Colorado Plateau with a force equivalent to ten megatons of TNT.

The impact vaporized much of the meteorite itself, excavated 175 million tons of rock, and created a crater 1,200 meters wide and 170 meters deep. The shockwave flattened everything within several miles. Temperatures at the impact point briefly exceeded those on the surface of the sun. In the silence that followed, dust settled over a landscape permanently altered.

Some Navajo oral tradition describes a star falling from the sky and creating a great hole in the earth, interpreted as a warning from the heavens. Some sources report a Hopi narrative of three gods descending in fiery chariots, one landing at this site, though the antiquity and authenticity of this specific tradition have been questioned by scholars. What is certain is that the peoples of this landscape lived with the crater's presence for thousands of years before Euro-American science arrived to explain it.