Facts About Meteor Crater - strangefacts

• Meteor Crater is a meteorite impact crater located approximately 43 miles (69 km) east of Flagstaff, near Winslow in the northern Arizona desert of the United States

• Because the US Department of the Interior Division of Names commonly recognizes names of natural features derived from the nearest post office, the feature acquired the name of “Meteor Crater” from the nearby post office named Meteor

• Middlesboro is the only city in the United States built within a meteor crater

• The crater was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when the local climate on the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper

• At the time, the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camels

• It was probably not inhabited by humans; the earliest confirmed record of human habitation in the Americas dates from long after this impact

• The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 50 meters (54 yards) across, which impacted the plain at a speed of several kilometers per second

• Meteor Crater was originally thought to be a volcanic crater, since there were other volcanic craters, including the still-active Sunset Crater, in the region

• However, in the 1890s, mineralogists discovered iron fragments in the crater. This led geologists to suggest that the crater was caused by a meteor crash

• Daniel Barringer (1860-1929), a Philadelphia mining engineer who explored the site in 1903, was convinced the meteorite was buried beneath the crater. He purchased the land and, in 1906, began drilling

Facts About Meteorites - strangefacts

• A meteorite is bits of the outer space that enter the earth surface surviving the impact. They are chunks and are no bigger than particles of dust and sand

• When in the outer space they are known as meteoroids but once when they enter the earth surface they are called meteors

• A meteor is a bright streak of light in the sky, popularly known as the shooting star or falling star, which is produced by the entry of a small meteoroid into the Earth's atmosphere

• Meteoroids move very fast. Some enter the Earth's atmosphere at as much as 130,000 miles per hour

• Meteorites contain the oldest known rocks in our solar system

• They also contain 'pre-solar grains', which are minerals that formed around other stars probably billions of years before our solar system was born

• Up to 4 billion meteoroids fall to Earth everyday

• But most of them are too tiny to do any noticeable harm

• In 2004, a 30-foot-wide meteoroid hit the atmosphere over Antarctica, leaving 2 million pounds of dust in its wake

• That was enough to seed rain clouds and affect climate all the way on the other side of the planet