As I drive up to the Meteor Crater, near Flagstaff, AZ, I am struck by the flat scrub desert that surrounds the center. The modern building is smack in the middle of nowhere. As I walk through the doors and up the steps to the crater. When I come to the outside door that leads to the crater, I am not expecting a giant hole in the ground, but that is what I am greeted with: a hole so large, you need a telescope to see to the other side and so deep you can’t see the bottom of the crater’s leftover mining equipment. The equipment was used to try to find the meteorite, until it was realized that most of the meteor vaporized on impact.
As I stare out into the vast, 4000 foot wide hole, I imagine the megafauna that roamed this area 50,000 years ago. Due to the glaciers pushing deep into the North American continent, Northern Arizona would have been lush grasslands and deciduous forests. The animals that would have grazed the lands would have been bison (9 feet tall and weighing 2200 pounds, camels (7 foot tall and weighing 1800 pounds), giant ground sloths (12 foot tall), and mammoths (14 high and weighing 22,000 pounds). These giants would have been lumbering along, grazing and living off the land, until that flaming meteor hit the ground, destroying the environment for miles around. Thankfully, the meteor was only 150 feet wide as opposed to the 20 mile wide meteor that hit the Chixulub area of the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Though there were tourists around, the vastness of the area was eerily quiet, sans the wind. To get a sense of more of this enormous crater, here is this weeks video: https://youtu.be/H4iIbCQODL8
Thanks for visiting Field Trip Nation. If you have ideas on where we should check out or where you want more information, leave a comment.
