Inside Meteor Crater

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]In the middle of nowhere in Arizona, there is a big freaking hole in the ground, and not just any big effing hole. This is a space hole, I guess. I'm talking about Meteor Crater, and this is widely considered to be the best preserved impact crater anywhere on Earth. And I got to hike down inside of it, which normally that is not open to the public to do. So, this was actually something I got invited to do via my day job. This has nothing to do with the channel, but I wanted to make a video about it because it's a very cool experience and I wanted to share it with you. So, the crater is in the Arizona desert about a half hour drive east of Flagstaff, and it is enormous. It's so big. It's like almost 3/4 of a mile across, and it's like 560 ft deep. And the the crater rim itself is lifted up from the ground, right? And that's almost like 150 ft above the desert around it. So, it is this really enormous structure. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. There's like nothing out there except, you know, like the visitor center, which was, you know, narrowly missed. And it's actually kind of hard to tell when you're there looking at it in person, but if you look at pictures of it from above, it's actually noticeably non-circular. And that is because of the like existing geology of the area when the meteorite struck, and it kind of was constrained slightly to make this a non-circular shape. So, Meteor Crater is designated a national natural landmark, but it is privately owned. So, it was actually bought by this wealthy businessman called Daniel Barringer back in the like the early 1900s. And that was because he thought that it was a impact crater from a meteorite, and that the iron from that meteorite was remaining at the bottom of the crater. So, he wanted to mine the crater and find the iron. Spoiler alert, he did not. But, the crater and the land around it is still owned by the Barringer family. Now, the crater was created about 50,000 years ago, which is actually not that long geologically speaking, one of the reasons why it is still so well preserved. Now, the meteorite that created this crater was a nickel-iron meteorite, and it was estimated to be about 40 to 50 m across.

[00:01:45]Now, probably about half of it vaporized just coming through the atmosphere, and the other half probably vaporized upon impact. So, there are fragments of the meteorite to be found. This is actually the largest fragment of it. It is in the visitor center, and this is a picture of me with an astronaut.

[00:01:59]That was fun. I was laughing my ass off cuz he made a joke about being short standing between [laughter] me and my husband.

[00:02:04]This is called the Holsinger fragment.

[00:02:05]It's the largest fragment that's ever been found of the meteorite, and it is about 2 and 1/2 ft across. So, there was no like remaining iron load of meteorite for Barringer to find. So, he was definitely wrong about that. But, what he was right about was the fact that the crater was caused by a meteorite impact because that was actually not what scientists thought at the time at all.

[00:02:22]They associated craters with volcanic activity. And not even like craters on the moon were thought to be formed by impacts. And so, Barringer was really dedicated to this idea that it was impact crater, and he was right about that, but he was very wrong about finding iron at the bottom of it. And I think he lost a lot of money along the way. And in fact, it was partly from studying Meteor Crater that scientists were able to come to understand the nature of impact craters and just how common they were, especially across the rest of the solar system, unlike on the Earth because craters here tend to get weathered away, which is why the Earth doesn't have very many craters compared to something like the moon or Mercury.

[00:02:52]Now, at the time of the strike 50,000 years ago, this area was actually not a desert. And so, there was actually a lake that formed at the bottom of this crater. But, eventually the climate changed, everything dried up, and now it is in a desert. And that dry climate is part of what has helped maintain this crater and keep it so well preserved.

[00:03:08]But, even so, there has been a lot of erosion and evolution of this crater.

[00:03:12]So, the rim has probably lost over 50 ft of height just from erosion. And because of that lake at the bottom, there's a lot of sediment that settled in the bottom of the crater. And so, while it's now about 560 ft deep, it probably was about 700 to 750 ft deep when it first formed. So, it has changed a lot, but even so, it is a very stark impact crater. And when you see it, you really are struck by just like how much of the landscape was just >> [snorts] >> away. Because the impact that created the crater was basically just like an explosion, like a really, really big explosion, probably around 20 to 40 megatons of energy released in about 10 seconds. And it excavated about 175 million tons of rock. For comparison, most powerful nuclear weapon ever constructed and tested, the Tsar Bomba, was about 50 megatons of energy.

[00:04:00]So, no, this meteorite wasn't a dinosaur killer, but it definitely killed a lot of wildlife in the region when it struck, and you can imagine the sort of damage this would do if it struck something like London or Manhattan or Beijing or, you know, Pasadena. And I don't want to scare you or anything, but 40 to 50 m is really small for an asteroid, and so we actually just don't know very much about this population of near-Earth asteroids that might potentially become this sort of meteorite someday.

[00:04:23]This is basically why B612 exists and why they invite people to come down to see the bottom of the crater. Because standing there in person and seeing all of that empty space that used to have rock, solid rock, that was just gone in a second, well, 10 seconds, I mean, you really appreciate the scale of what these things can do and the magnitude of the challenge of finding all of these types of asteroids. So, that is one of the reasons I wanted to make this video.

[00:04:46]Again, they do not know I'm making this video. It's not sponsored or anything, but I think they are doing really great work, and I think it's a really important mission, and so I wanted to highlight it as well as just share all of this really cool information and images and video. It was such a cool experience, y'all. The hike was definitely very steep in and out of the crater, but it was, you know, very manageable. I've done a lot of hiking in my time. And while obviously I have always been interested in this kind of thing, it gave me a new appreciation for meteorites and their impact, literally.

[00:05:12]>> [laughter] >> If you ever find yourself at Meteor Crater, there is a really cool hike you can do around the outside of the rim, even if you can't go down into the bottom of the crater. Although, I think they were saying they might be opening up this bottom of the crater hike at some point in the future. So, maybe I won't be as special for getting to go [laughter] down.

[00:05:28]To give you guys a sense of the scale of this, cuz I feel like these numbers just don't really quite do it justice. So, this is from me standing on the rim of the crater looking down into the crater, and do you see that rock? That rock?

[00:05:39]That little tiny rock? Well, this is that rock. This is [laughter] that rock.

[00:05:43]And that's where I was standing.

[00:05:46]It's big. It's really, really big. I also got to meet an astronaut, Ed Lu, who is the director of the B612 Foundation, and he was so impressive, [laughter] really.

[00:05:55]He like casually told me over lunch that he and his son built an airplane.

[00:05:59]>> [laughter] >> Astronauts really are another breed, y'all. Very, very impressive man, and very nice, too. Um and very invested in this mission. Everyone that I met from the B612 Foundation was really amazing.

[00:06:09]Um so, thanks to them, and thanks to my husband for coming along with me and being my uh videographer.

[00:06:15]>> [laughter] >> So, thank you so much for watching. I will see you again soon. Bye.