The crater was created about 50,000 years ago. The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 160 ft (50 m) across.
The speed of the impact has been a subject of some debate. Modeling initially suggested that the meteorite struck at up to 45,000 mph (20 km/s), but more recent research suggests the impact was substantially slower, at 29,000 mph (12.8 km/s).
About half of the impactor's bulk is believed to have been vaporized during its descent through the atmosphere. Impact energy has been estimated at 10 megatons TNT. The meteorite was mostly vaporized upon impact, leaving few remains in the crater.
by Busy_Yesterday9455
29 Comments
Curious to see how many stupid comments there will be regarding how the meteor just missed the visitor center.
Awesome. I definitely want to go there eventually.
Crazy how close the asteroid landed to that building.
Good thing the visitor center survived.
Asteroid City my beloved
Don’t fly directly over the crater
Love flying home to Los Angeles from Dallas seeing this
Isn’t that where baby Superman landed?
Can you actually go visit that or is it closed to the public?
Looks like a giant skull scaped into the crater or one of those Ape NFTs
That’s where the Big Lebowski returned to space.
“Canyon Diablo” is the name of the iron meteorite fragments of anyone is interested in getting some. Some great pieces out there.
So that it doesn’t look like a gratuitous self promotion, I do not stock this material.
Looks kinda like a nuclear test crater
Oh hey it’s Nuketown
This is the type of history that makes me awestruck
I wonder why we haven’t experienced more craters like this
Can we get a banana for scale?
Man, that visitor center is lucky. It almost got hit by that meteor!
Nah that’s Nuketown
Drove out there from Flagstaff on a family weekend trip a few years ago. It was cool to learn about the crater and see how big it was a ground level. The Visitor’s Center was pretty impressive and had a lot of interesting information and facts about the crater and how NASA used it for moon landing prep back in the day.
Dang. That meteor almost hit the visitors center.
Every meteor crash site has a big hole. Are these holes made for the meteors to land?
No, it’s Yamcha
America’s favorite hole!
It’s got a fun little museum, too. Very family friendly. My kids liked it more than the Grand Canyon.
I’ve passed this like 4 times on road trips, and have never had the time to pay it a visit.
It’s really cool to see in person.
It’s literally just a big hole in the ground and there isn’t much to see/do at the gift shop but I still make sure stop every time I happen to drive by, which is only once so far because it’s really not near anything… but I definitely *would* stop in if I happen to be driving by again