Meteor Crater (4 Pics)

Our tour guide Arnie at the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Northeast Arizona. Ok, I don't really remember his name. I call all middle-aged male tour guides Arnie, after the Hoover Dam guide in the movie Vegas Vacation.

These are very cool! I never knew there was such a place. Thanks for sharing these, Lonnie.

WOW! great shots, All I can say is that must have been one helluva BANG, when that baby hit.

Interesting shots of an interesting place. The people help give an idea of the scale of the place.

PS Are you Lonnie or Thomas?

More good shots, Lonnie.

The last one gives a real sense of the size of that thing.........enormous​!!!. great pics

Thanks for the comments.

stoneylonesome wrote:
WOW! great shots, All I can say is that must have been one helluva BANG, when that baby hit.

Ain't that the truth! I sure wouldn't have wanted to be around when it happened. And this was not the largest meteorite to ever hit Earth, either. Not by a long shot...

rudgej wrote:
PS Are you Lonnie or Thomas?

I answer to both. My real name is Lonnie, but I've been using the name Thomas online since the early 1980's, so the two are pretty much interchangable as far as I'm concerned.

The Sudbury Crater in Ontario is supposed to be one of the largest and has been estimated to be about 200-250 km in diameter. In comparison I believe the Barringer crater is about 1.2 km in diameter.

The Barringer Crater is about 2.5 miles in circumference. I've been out of school way too long to remember how to convert that to diameter.

The meteorite that created it is estimated to have been about 150 feet wide, weighing several hundred thousand tons (it was 92% iron, 7% nickel and the rest a mix of about 80 trace elements), and slammed into the ground traveling at about 40,000 miles per hour.

If I remember correctly, Arnie said the largest meteorite to hit the planet was in southern Mexico and was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Sudbury crater is the 2nd largest. There is one in South Africa called the Vredefort Dome, that is/was about 300km.....YIKES A lot of it has eroded away but none the less it was/is the largest. I have seen the Sudbury crater.......well a small part of it anyway

great shots showing a great location,making me want to go visit !

thomascanty wrote:
The Barringer Crater is about 2.5 miles in circumference. I've been out of school way too long to remember how to convert that to diameter.

2.5 miles circumference = 4.667 km

Circumference = pi*Diameter, so Diameter = Circumference/pi

4.667/pi =1.49 km

(or, if the diameter is actually 1.2 km, the circumference = 3.77 km or 2.34 miles)


And thery are really cool shots. Love to visit there some day.

I just found a page on the official web site for the crater (linked to in my original post in this thread) that gives the circumference as 2.4 miles. You're close enough for me.

cool shots. I was there a couple of years ago for a brief visit.

Is it possible to walk around the entire rim?

The dinosaurs died from flu.

The crater in Mexico (Chicxulub Crater) is a hoax by insurance companies to boost premiums and give themselves a nice opt out in case of future mass extinction.

For those interested you might want to be aware of how often these things hit:

Pea-size meteoroids - 10 per hour - (might give you a headache)
Walnut-size - 1 per hour - (might knock your head off)
Grapefruit-size - 1 every 10 hours - (would knock you out of your shoes)
Basketball-size - 1 per month (goodbye to the neighbourhood)
50-m rock that would destroy an area the size of New Jersey - 1 per 100 years - (so it isn't all bad news then!)
1-km asteroid - 1 per 100,000 years (look up now one's overdue)
2-km asteroid - 1 per 500,000 years (what was that shadow?)
A "nemesis" parabolic comet impactor would give us only a 6-month warning. (don't make any holiday plans for after september then!)