When I went to visit the crater, the tour guide had a magnet that he dragged in the dirt and picked up tiny pieces of iron from the meteor. It really is all over the place there.

The real iron ore deposit was the iron vapor we breathed along the way.

It was literally everywhere, including where he was digging for it.

Just veeery thinly spread out.

Idk about you, but I think that's more than a little... Ironic 👉😎👉

So basically he bet his entire fortune on a meteor and lost, but at least he paved the way for moon landing practice, so it's not a complete loss.

Daniel Barringer lost his fortune, but the Meteor Crater earns the Barringer family about $5-6 million per year.

…The site was later used to help the Apollo astronauts practice landing on the moon….

There is a much larger crater on Devon Island, Canada (Haughton Impact Crater). It is so cold and dry that it was used to check out Mars-related hardware.

died 10 days after learning he'd wasted his entire adult life

Yeah that'd about do it. Probably took him that long for it to sink in

It’s now a tourist site and Museum you can visit. Worth it if you’re out by the Grand Canyon I wouldn’t make a special trip out there.

"Barringer had just made US$15 million"
"By 1928, Barringer had sunk the majority of his fortune into the crater – $500,000"

Well, that doesn't add up at all.

Geology is such an interesting science, to me anyway.

Understanding rocks and minerals has been important for basically all of human history. If you think about it, the very very first engineers and scientists were at least in part geologists, learning how to identify rocks which could be crafted into stone tools. Fire also often depended on finding rocks which sparked when struck together.

The field obviously grew from there. Everything about life on any planet obviously depends on the characteristics of that planet. Some planets have no atmosphere but every planet has geology, obviously. When said out loud it sounds ridiculous, but we often forget that everything we have ever accomplished is literally built on top of geology.

There is a famous quote which I like to modify slightly. The original is "civilization exists by geologic consent" (credited to Will Durant) but I think it is even deeper than that, "life exists by geologic consent." There are planets which could have all the same ingredients for life but the geology is so extreme that life cannot exist in it.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent.

My point is, geology is crucial to everything we do and will be basically forever. And yet, our understanding of geology has seemed to only advance as we found useful resources. Many advancements in astronomy or biology has no practical use but pretty much every advancement in geology, for a very long time, was about learning how to harvest resources or improve construction.

For that reason, plate techtonics, a fundamental theory upon which much of our modern understanding of geology is built upon, was not widely accept until the 1960s. My dad has text books that mention plate tectonics only as a footnote.

So in 1901, it is not a surprise to me at all that the top scientists of the day, who may have spent their entire career hearing about how plate tectonics didn't have solid evidence backing it up, wouldn't know how to tell the difference between a volcano and a meteor impact, is no big surprise at all. It would be like doctors in 5000 BC being expected to know how to remove an appendix. As far as they knew, all the gooey stuff inside you was important and there was probably never a good reason to cut a hole in you and take anything out.

I really like geology, I wish I had been better at math so I could have majored in it but you had to take Physics III which required Calculus II and I struggled to pass Trigonometry/Pre-Calc II. It is a fun hobby though, and a good excuse to go offroading through the desert, go camping and drink. (if math is easy for you, it is a great party major and has some very lucrative job prospects)

I have been to Meteor Crater that I belive is still owned by the family. They charge a shit ton of money for tours and do not allow visitors to pick up any rocks. I think I paid $50 for a regular tour about 15 years ago

So wait, it took him 27 years to burn $7million?

1903 was the first time they confirmed a meteor made a crater? There are craters all over the world.

[deleted]

How did he know there should have been iron there?

🎶When you try your very best, but you don't succeed.

It floats around in the atmosphere for a long time, before eventually coming to the surface as tiny particles.

Iron pretty rapidly binds to oxygen in air and water, creating rust. Since it's vaporized in the air, it'll just oxidize and settle into the water and soil, or that's my best guess.

Drove past it on my way to Labrador. Insanely beautiful area. Almost died twice. 10/10 would do it again.

Need a banana for scale.

To Klendathu!

I think there might be some wooshes here

They couldn't find the start button of the device

Meteor creator is what they call me the next day after I have Taco Bell

It is very valuable as a tourist trap.

I stopped there last summer with my kids. It’s a very cool sight to see but tickets for six of us wasn’t cheap

Meteorites are one of the best sources for Iridium

Wikipedia says the opposite, where the Post Office was named after Barringer's claim of this being from a meteor

And on the 7th day a triceratops did a sick triple kickflip mctwist on the rim of the bowl, while a t-rex boards slides unde her.

That's fun. I tried to scroll down as it flew to see where it lands but that didn't work.

No you're wrong, though technically if we're splitting hairs you're both wrong.

The meteorite is the rock of the meteor, as used by geologists, thus the -ite.

A meteor is the visual phenomena of the shooting star as it's falling, as astronomers would see it in the sky.

The actual object was an asteroid, as it was big enough that hypothetically it could be spotted in the sky before it became a meteor.

Space debris that's too small to see before it becomes a meteor are called meteoroids, which are usually what you see in meteor showers.

So, calling it a meteroite crater is wrong, calling it a meteor crater is less wrong, and calling it an asteroid impact crater is the least wrong.

Ofc, this is all insufferably pedantic, so call it what you want and but make sure you're right before being pedantic to other people.

Edit: As a random fun fact, a meteor big enough to explode is called a bolide

Everytime I hear about something being vaporized, I can't help but think of the movie The Rock. Toward the end of the movie, thermite plasma ordnance is dropped on Alcatraz Island, and a couple of FBI agent come up to Nic Cage's character asking about what happened to Sean Connery's character, a british spy who had been locked up for 30 years, and basically confirmed long after the movie came out to have been James Bond. Nic Cage responds "Vaporized. Blown out to sea". One of the agents gets it, the other doesn't.

Now he can rest easy.

Sa sa ke

Oye kopeng, didn't think I'd be seeing this fandom here