What Happened to the Asteroid That Created Meteor Crater in Arizona?

Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed roughly 50,000 years ago when an iron asteroid about 150 feet wide struck the desert at approximately 26,000 miles per hour, releasing energy equivalent to several million tons of TNT — and the asteroid itself almost entirely vaporized on impact.

How Big Is Meteor Crater?

The crater measures about 4,000 feet (roughly three-quarters of a mile) across and 550 feet deep. Its floor is wide enough to fit twenty football fields placed side by side. Located near Winslow in northern Arizona, it is the best-preserved meteorite impact crater on Earth, partly because the dry desert climate has slowed erosion for tens of millennia.

Why Did Scientists Think It Was a Volcano?

For years after European settlers encountered the crater, the leading scientific explanation was a volcanic steam explosion — not an asteroid strike. The reasoning seemed sound: a vast volcanic field sits just twenty miles away, and ancient volcanic craters can look strikingly similar to impact craters from the surface.

In 1891, the chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey visited the site and swept it with a magnetic instrument searching for buried iron. He found no significant signal and officially declared the feature volcanic. That conclusion, backed by the authority of the Survey, stuck in scientific circles for years.

Who Was Daniel Barringer and What Did He Believe?

In 1903, a Philadelphia mining engineer named Daniel Barringer arrived at a very different conclusion. Barringer was convinced that a massive iron meteorite — roughly 10 million tons of it — lay buried just beneath the crater floor, largely intact. At the metal prices of the early twentieth century, such a deposit would have been worth more than a billion dollars.

Barringer staked a legal mining claim on the crater and began drilling. Over the next 27 years he sank shafts as deep as 1,375 feet, relocating his drilling operations repeatedly as each attempt came up empty. He poured his personal fortune into the search and devoted the final decades of his life to it.

What Finally Proved the Asteroid Impact Theory?

The killing blow to Barringer’s buried-mass theory came from mathematics, not drilling. In 1929, astronomer Forest Ray Moulton calculated the physics of what happens when a body the size and speed of the Meteor Crater impactor actually hits the ground. His analysis was unambiguous: an object traveling at roughly 26,000 miles per hour carries so much kinetic energy that the heat generated on impact would have vaporized the iron almost instantaneously. There was no buried mass. The asteroid had essentially become the sky.

Barringer died later that same year, 1929, before he could fully absorb the implications of Moulton’s work. He never recovered the fortune he had spent — because the treasure he was hunting had ceased to exist the moment it arrived.

What Happened to the Crater After Barringer’s Death?

Barringer’s family retained ownership of the crater, and his descendants still own and operate it today as a privately held landmark — one of the very few major geological features in the United States under continuous private ownership since its original claim.

The crater’s scientific value only grew after Barringer’s death. NASA recognized that its impact geology closely mirrors the surface conditions of the Moon, and during the 1960s Apollo astronauts trained at Meteor Crater to prepare for lunar fieldwork. The man who chased a vanished iron mass inadvertently preserved the site that helped humans walk on the Moon.

Why Does Meteor Crater Matter to Science?

Meteor Crater demonstrated for the first time — through hard physical and mathematical evidence — that large impact events are real, geologically significant, and capable of reshaping landscapes in an instant. It shifted the scientific consensus toward taking asteroid impacts seriously as a planetary force, a shift that now underpins our understanding of mass extinctions, lunar geology, and planetary defense.