We’ve seen the power of nature in our travels. We’ve seen beauty and life but also death and destruction. We’ve seen the human stories, stories of home, art, and conflict. But humans and nature are not the only ones to shape the desert landscape before you.
Today, we examine space.
Space? You may be thinking. Like outer space? What does that have to do with the desert?
Well, my friend, the two are related. The desert Southwest is vast and open. You can drive far, far from cities, from people, into the dark emptiness of the plains. Look up, and you’ll see more stars than you could have ever imagined. The stargazing potential of the Southwest has captivated enthusiasts and scientists alike. People gaze upwards and tell tales of shooting stars, planets, and even the occasional UFO. There are so many incredible things up there, things beyond our wildest dreams. Most of the time, those things stay high above our heads, in a world we can only gain access to with telescopes and space ships.
But every so often, space and the desert collide. Those things we marvel at in the night sky hit close to home.
Drive out on I-40 and into the desert plains of Arizona. By now, you’ve surely acclimated to the flat, empty landscape. We’ve seen it time and time again – vast expanses of desert scrub. Stubby mesquite and juniper trees, yellow grass, occasional grazing cattle, and little else. People often think of the desert as sandy dunes with saguaro cacti, scorpions, and rattlesnakes dotting the landscape. More often than not, however, the desert Southwest looks like this. Empty.
Exit toward Meteor Crater. It is a bit of a drive from the Interstate, but it is worth every mile. Nowhere else in the Southwest has a story like this one.
Upon your arrival, take your time to explore. They have a museum you can visit, full of videos to watch, displays to read, and even a meteorite fragment to touch. As children, we learn that meteors and meteorites are rocks from space, but this fragment is no ordinary rock. Made up of mostly nickel and iron, it looks and feels more like metal than rock. You will surely notice this unique texture yourself. It is a curiosity.
When you have finished in the museum, head outside. There are tours out to the crater itself. Your visit would not be complete without one. As you marvel at the scale of the crater, your guide may tell you that it has a diameter of 4,000 feet and that twenty football fields could fit on floor. Try to imagine. Sometimes, when we humans are presented with landforms truly enormous in scale, we cannot comprehend the size. We know objectively that it is big, but we can’t apply that information to what we see. It is too much for limited minds.
Try anyway.
The museum displays, the meteorite fragments, the crater before you. You've surely put these pieces together and realized the story of this site.
In this place fifty thousand years ago, a meteorite slammed into the Earth. The 150-foot meteorite hit with a force greater than 2.5 million tons of TNT. A massive shock wave swept the plains. The resulting explosion vaporized the land, melting stone and disintegrating it into dust. Rock was thrown from the crater, millions of tons of it, to be scattered across the surrounding plains. The force of the explosion was so strong that it overturned rock layers completely, permanently and drastically altering the geology of the region.
Dust and molten droplets of rock rained down on the plains. When the it finally stopped, the crater was all that remained. The meteorite had been broken into fragments or vaporized entirely by a force so strong that it annihilated everything in its path. The land itself was in ruins.
Today, the seven hundred foot deep crater remains, a permanent scar on the region. The land can never forget the power of space. It will always remember. Millions of years from now, when erosion has wiped away the crater, the rock layers, shocked crystals, and meteorite fragments will remain to tell the tale. This is a story etched into the Earth.
It's a cool story, to be sure. It is hard to not find a meteorite impact interesting. Indeed, people come from far out of their way to visit. It is another of the desert’s many roadside attractions.
Ah, but this is all surface information. It is a story you can discover simply by looking at the land. Did I not promise you that we would look a little farther? That we would discover the deeper secrets beneath the Southwest?
There is a darker side to this otherwise cool bit of geology. We stand at the lip of the crater and marvel at its size. We touch the meteorite and think how cool it is to have a piece of an actual space rock. We look at pictures of the moon and jabber excitedly about the craters on its surface and how they compare to our own. It is all cool. Out of the ordinary. Interesting.
But it is only cool because it happened so long ago.
Meteor impacts are a part of life. Not our lives, necessarily – we are too short-lived compared to the rest of the universe. But in the life of the Earth, in her 4.5 billion years of existence, meteor impacts have been unavoidable. Most of the time, they were small and insignificant. We see them today as shooting stars. But others were like the meteor before you, annihilating the land and leaving only a crater in its wake. These large meteor impacts were not common, but they did exist. You've likely heard of the impact that caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. These things did happen, and they will happen again.
That, my friends, is the dark side to Meteor Crater. This meteor hit the middle of the desert 50,000 years ago and caused such a level of destruction that it left permanent, massive scars in the land. Imagine the next one. It will come. We do not know when, we do not know where, but we know it will happen again. It is only a matter of time.
Don’t believe me? Ask NASA. They have an office specifically dedicated to searching for Near-Earth Objects. The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies searches the skies for asteroids and comets that could be dangerous to Earth. They track the orbits, extrapolating where these objects will go in the future, and try to predict when the Earth is in danger. They have discovered thousands of Near-Earth Objects. Most are small and harmless. Most, but not all.
Another impact is inevitable. Perhaps it will impact the middle of the desert like at Meteor Crater. Perhaps we will get lucky, and the only causalities will be the rocks and plants. But don’t count on it, my friends. Our world is crawling with people. We have settled nearly all corners of the globe. We have cities where millions of people crowd into one space. Imagine an impact here. The devastation at Meteor Crater would be nothing compared to it.
So as we look and marvel at this one-of-a-kind geologic feature, we must remember that this is a natural part of life in the solar system. Impacts happen. Another will occur eventually. Just give it time. It may be during your lifetime, it may not. But it will happen. And despite our years of technological advancement, we have found no clear way to stop it. All we can do is watch.
References:
Meteor Crater's "Brief History" brochure, distributed in 2018.
NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, website here: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/
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