Arizona’s meteor craters and other scars left by collisions with space rocks continue to yield their secrets.
The meteor crater formed about 50,000 years ago. It represents the best-preserved meteor impact site in the world, measuring about 700 feet deep (213 meters), more than 4,000 feet across (1,219 meters), and 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers) in circumference.
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Natural laboratory
A frequent visitor to the crash site is Dan Durda, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
“Meteor Crater is the best-preserved and most exposed impact crater on Earth,” Durda told Space.com. “That makes it the perfect natural laboratory for impact crater studies. The crater continues to yield new insights every year, so continued studies there are very important.”
Similarly, Christian Koeberl is at the Department of Lithospheric Research at the University of Vienna in Austria. He chairs the Barringer Crater Company (BCC) Scientific Advisory Committee. The Barringer Crater Company has established scholarships to support students and early career scientists studying terrestrial impact craters, for better understanding of these craters and their formations, and also to encourage students to enter such important lines of research.
“Barringer Crater – also known as Meteor Crater – was one of the first, if not the first, crater recognized on Earth as being of impact origin in the early 1900s,” Koeberl tells Space.com.
The recognition of impact craters on Earth is difficult, Koeberl said, because active geological and atmospheric processes on our planet tend to obscure or erase the impact record for geologically short periods of time.
“Despite limited information about the early impact, we know that the impacts had severe effects on the geological and biological evolution of Earth,” Koeberl said. For example, a major impact event on Earth marking the transition from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene, about 66 million years ago, he added.
The most iconic species to fall victim to an impact, the dinosaurs, “literally had no chance,” Koeberl said.
Read more: 10 must-see terrestrial impact craters
High energy geological event
Morphological and geophysical surveys are important for recognizing anomalous subsurface structural features, Koeberl said, which could be deeply eroded craters or impact structures completely covered by post-impact sediments.
“Detailed investigations involve confirmation of either shock metamorphic effects in minerals and rocks, and/or the presence of a meteoritic component in these rocks. In nature, shock metamorphic effects are uniquely characteristic of shock levels associated with hypervelocity impact,” Koeberl said.
An impact crater is a short-lived, high-energy geological event that creates conditions that exceed those of nuclear bomb explosions.
This type of study has led to the identification of, so far, about 200 confirmed impact craters on Earth, Koeberl said. “Contact crater studies have indeed grown in importance over the years and are a multidisciplinary effort. We encourage young researchers from around the world to submit grant proposals,” he said.
Applications for freezing of family funds and the prizes are administered by The Meteoritical Society and are due by 1st April.
