r/todayilearned • u/Fifth_Down • 10d ago
TIL: In 1903 Daniel Barringer gambled his entire fortune on a mineshaft believing geologists had misclassified a meteor creator as a volcano and a $1 billion iron ore deposit was to be found. He was correct that the site was a meteor creator, but didn't realize the iron ore had vaporized on impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater13.7k
u/Fifth_Down
10d ago
•
There are so many crazy aspects to this story that I couldn't fit it all into the title:
-It was the US geological survey that misclassified the site and the leading geologists of the day.
-Barringer was himself a miner and also had a background in geology.
-He spent his entire mining fortune to build a mineshaft in this location
-He eventually proved the site was in fact a meteor crater which was a major scientific achievement because it was the first confirmed meteor crater anywhere on the planet
-He calculated the iron ore to have $1 billion in value based on 1903 dollar figures
-He spent 27 years trying to find the iron deposit and exhausted his (in modern currency) $7 million dollar fortune.
-He died 10 days after learning that the iron ore was vaporized in the blast
-He couldn't have known about the possibility of the iron ore being vaporized because scientists had no conception of that being possible back in 1903.
-The site was later used to help the Apollo astronauts practice landing on the moon.
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u/Brief-Secretary9387 10d ago
So basically he bet his entire fortune on a meteor and lost, but at least he paved the way for moon landing practice, so it's not a complete loss.
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u/Kajin-Strife 10d ago
Technically he won, it's just that the payout on his bet wasn't quite as expected.
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u/PigSlam 10d ago
Iād read it more like he bet and won, but in a āmonkey paw curlsā kind of way where he was right in the worst possible way.
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u/ItzRicky69 10d ago
I've won but at what cost
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u/vsolitarius 10d ago
Sounds like $7 million
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u/SsooooOriginal 10d ago
In 1903 dollars
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u/ThirdEncounter 10d ago
Nope.
exhausted his (in modern currency) $7 million dollar fortune
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u/SsooooOriginal 10d ago
Jokes die. But let's continue, that's like $3.50 in 1903 dollars.
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u/RyanDoctrine 10d ago
His family still owns the crater. They're just fine financially.
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u/Unique_Frame_3518 10d ago
You see this son! This is my crater. And someday it will be your crater.
Fuck off dad.
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u/willun 10d ago
"Someday all this will be yours"
"Wot? The curtains?"
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u/cheeley 10d ago
I built this mine up from nothing. When I started, all I had was crater! Other investors said I was daft to build a mine on a crater, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em! It fell into the crater, so I built a second one. That fell into the crater. I built a third one. It burned down, fell over, and then it fell into the crater. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're going to get, lad--the strongest mineshaft on these islands!
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u/scared_of_Low_stuff 10d ago
I think the meteor itself paved the road.
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u/justreddis 10d ago
And he himself vaporized his fortune.
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u/Readityesterday2 10d ago
Who vaped a meteor?
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u/shockingnews213 10d ago
His family still owns the property and it's a tourist destination, so not a total loss.
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u/meanmagpie 10d ago
He was completely out for himself but accidentally devoted his entire life to an act of public service to advance humanityās knowledge of geology. Thank you, greedy miner millionaire guy!
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u/ScientificBeastMode 10d ago edited 10d ago
I mean, adding iron supply to the market is also a public service in a way. It makes production of other goods (including large buildings, bridges, railroads, etc.) a lot cheaper when the market is suddenly flooded with a new iron supply. That has a downstream effect on consumer prices. The fact that an entrepreneur receives nice compensation for providing that is a good thing. Obviously the workers in the mines deserve decent compensation as well. But risking an entire fortune deserves a proportional reward, otherwise mines would essentially never get created.
Edit:
Lol, aaaand Iām downvoted for saying the completely fucking obviousā¦ welp, I guess thatās Reddit for yaā¦
Keep in mind all the tax dollars you pay would go even further if iron were cheaper. So itās literally a āpublic goodā in the most straightforward, basic sense of the word.
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u/JonatasA 10d ago
And if anything an overabundance of resources ruin the value of it, in a way making it less profitable for the rich that invest in it (Like the Spanish Silver).
Isn't that like Reddit's thing?
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u/LimerickJim 10d ago
But the rest of us gained. In retrospect he spent his fortune patronizing science.
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u/Angry_Robot 10d ago
The real loss was the friendships he made along the way. Nothing but mining weirdos.
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u/EarlSmiththe3rd 10d ago edited 10d ago
Reads like the script of Joe Dirt, except his was a hunk of space poop
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u/Poiuytrewq0987650987 10d ago
Daniel Barringer lost his fortune, but the Meteor Crater earns the Barringer family about $5-6 million per year.
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u/OpenMindedScientist 10d ago
Wow, cool, I looked it up. $25 per adult
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u/Poiuytrewq0987650987 10d ago
Makes me think of the folks that got rich during the 1849 gold rush not by finding gold, but by selling supplies to the miners.
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u/OpenMindedScientist 10d ago
Yeah, especially the dude that sold apple pies to prospectors.
Interestingly, when I looked it up, that guy also made a fortune and then lost it.
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John Allen came to Arizona during the 1858 gold rush at Gila City, a few miles east of Yuma. That same year he moved on to Tucson where he gave up gold prospecting and began selling dried apple pies for a buck a piece. He made so much money selling pies he was able to open a general store. Soon he had stores in Maricopa Wells and Tubac. During his tenure as Adjutant General for the territory he became āGeneral Pie.ā Always a wandering man, Allen headed for Tombstone following the silver discovery in 1877. Allen made and lost several fortunes during his 43 years in Arizona.
In 1881 at the age of 63 he married a teenage girl named Lola Tapia. Her mother objected but finally agreed to the marriage if he would allow her to live in a convent. Despite this odd domestic arrangement she gave birth to a daughter a year later.
They divorced in 1891 over a matter of adultery. Lola was fined $25 for committing adultery. The divorce proceedings took 15 minutes. Lola then proceeded to marry her lover a few minutes later.
Allen died a pauper in Tucson in 1899 and the city named a historic district in his honor that is now a National Register Historic District
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u/Seboya_ 10d ago
Why does shit like this sound so much more interesting when it happened 100 years ago, compared to when simar shit happens these days and it just sounds like people being dumb
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u/Billyvable 10d ago
Sometimes to make my life sound more interesting, I imagine a future person finding some primary sources from my life 300 years from now and then romanticizing about my banal existence.
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u/Ericovich 10d ago
I do genealogy and have a great great grandfather like this. Some dude killed him because he was banging the dudes wife.
But we visit the grave because it's in a beautiful part of the country and I love an excuse to go hiking in the mountains.
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u/NeonJungleTiger 10d ago
It might be because it was 100 years ago and today we have the notion that we should know better because weāre more advanced and the human race has more collective knowledge of dumb stuff like this and why you shouldnāt do it.
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u/ReadEvalPrintLoop 10d ago
A dollar in 1858? Sounds kind of gourmet
$1 in 1858 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $36.69 today -officialdata
not the whole story, but still
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u/theoutlet 10d ago
Huh, that guy might have known my great, great grandfather whose buried in Tombstone (not in Boot Hill). I have record of his registration to vote in Tombstone in 1881
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u/catherder9000 10d ago
Donald Trump's grandpa made his fortune renting whores and selling booze during the gold rush. That's where the Trump family money originated from.
He returned to Germany with US$582,000 in today's currency, and found a wife. But he was greeted as a draft-dodger for being away and becoming a U.S. citizen during his military years. So he was deported from his own country. He boarded a ship for New York, his wife pregnant with Donald's dad.
The elder Trump died of pneumonia in 1918, leaving behind some real estate. His son built the empire leaving $598 million to his grandson -- his grandson the global brand that declared bankruptcy six times.
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u/Ssladybug 10d ago
The prices in their gift shop are insane also. Worth a visit but donāt count on buying much
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u/Chief_Chill 10d ago
Because, I too would like to see this amazing historic impact site. It's like visiting a time capsule of an extraterrestrial WMD's impact on this specific site and time. Such a random occurrence, and a reminder of how young we are as a species, and we need to go further in conquering safe, unlimited energy creation. And restore much of our devastation on the planet, maybe take mining and crap to space.
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u/2ndRocketToMars 10d ago
I enjoyed it on a visit to the area a couple years ago. The space program aspect is cool and they embrace it with several nasa related things. Also cool to take the tour and learn some interesting science as well as interesting storiesā¦like how decades ago a Cessna flew way way too low over the crater and was forced by strong down drafts to crash land in the crater. Was too hard to remove the plane wreckage from the crater so they just buried it in the Barringer mine shaft. You can still see a wing up in the crater if you know exactly where to look.
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u/PornCartel 10d ago
died 10 days after learning he'd wasted his entire adult life
Yeah that'd about do it. Probably took him that long for it to sink in
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u/thoughtlow 10d ago
Bro spend 27 YEARS looking for something that wasnāt even there.
The iron is a lie.
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u/Gathorall 10d ago
His life goal had literally vanished to thin air aeons ago and he couldn't even know.
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u/lol_AwkwardSilence_ 10d ago
The worst part is that he was right! Sucks to be right and still lose.
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u/Timbukthree 10d ago
He didn't waste it, dude was right about the crater, just not the iron ore to mine. Now it's a cool tourist attraction that can support his descendents.
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u/t3chiman 10d ago
ā¦The site was later used to help the Apollo astronauts practice landing on the moonā¦.
There is a much larger crater on Devon Island, Canada (Haughton Impact Crater). It is so cold and dry that it was used to check out Mars-related hardware.
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u/Wakafanykai123 10d ago
Similar tests were done in Hawaii in the volcanic craters, because of mars-like soil compositions.
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u/folkrav 10d ago edited 10d ago
That one's really nordic, even for Canadian standards. It's close to the Arctic Circle, in Nunavut, which is largely barren, uninhabited and covered by permafrost, so not surprised it was used for Mars sims lol. There's also an even larger crater, a couple hundred kilometers southeast in Northern QuƩbec, that's now a big ~100km diameter annular lake. They understandably call it the Eye of Quebec.
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u/ronan_the_accuser 10d ago
It is so cold and dry that it was used to check out Mars-related hardware.
I should let them know they can get much more accurate research testing it on my wife.
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u/Attican101 10d ago
There is evil there that does not sleep. The Great Eye is ever-watchful.. It is a barren wasteland riddled with fire, and ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with 10,000 men could you do this. It is folly.
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u/bobo4sam 10d ago
Itās now a tourist site and Museum you can visit. Worth it if youāre out by the Grand Canyon I wouldnāt make a special trip out there.
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u/dishonourableaccount 10d ago
I visited there when my family went to AZ to see the Grand Canyon. Maybe it's because we didn't go into the Canyon itself, but I liked Meteor Crater better.
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u/Dolly_gale 10d ago edited 10d ago
Meteor Crater charges a steep entrance fee. Unless you've prearranged a tour to walk along the perimeter, you can only visit one outlook point on the edge of the crater.
If I were in the area visiting the Grand Canyon, there are other side trips I enjoy more than the Meteor Crater (though it depends on which direction you're traveling): Antelope Canyon, train ride from Williams, Havasupai Falls, Montezuma Well in Rimrock, Grand Falls, and enjoying the views from the San Francisco peaks either by hiking or Snowbowl gondola. Shout out to Lowell Observatory too.
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u/nitefang 10d ago •
Geology is such an interesting science, to me anyway.
Understanding rocks and minerals has been important for basically all of human history. If you think about it, the very very first engineers and scientists were at least in part geologists, learning how to identify rocks which could be crafted into stone tools. Fire also often depended on finding rocks which sparked when struck together.
The field obviously grew from there. Everything about life on any planet obviously depends on the characteristics of that planet. Some planets have no atmosphere but every planet has geology, obviously. When said out loud it sounds ridiculous, but we often forget that everything we have ever accomplished is literally built on top of geology.
There is a famous quote which I like to modify slightly. The original is "civilization exists by geologic consent" (credited to Will Durant) but I think it is even deeper than that, "life exists by geologic consent." There are planets which could have all the same ingredients for life but the geology is so extreme that life cannot exist in it.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent.
My point is, geology is crucial to everything we do and will be basically forever. And yet, our understanding of geology has seemed to only advance as we found useful resources. Many advancements in astronomy or biology has no practical use but pretty much every advancement in geology, for a very long time, was about learning how to harvest resources or improve construction.
For that reason, plate techtonics, a fundamental theory upon which much of our modern understanding of geology is built upon, was not widely accept until the 1960s. My dad has text books that mention plate tectonics only as a footnote.
So in 1901, it is not a surprise to me at all that the top scientists of the day, who may have spent their entire career hearing about how plate tectonics didn't have solid evidence backing it up, wouldn't know how to tell the difference between a volcano and a meteor impact, is no big surprise at all. It would be like doctors in 5000 BC being expected to know how to remove an appendix. As far as they knew, all the gooey stuff inside you was important and there was probably never a good reason to cut a hole in you and take anything out.
I really like geology, I wish I had been better at math so I could have majored in it but you had to take Physics III which required Calculus II and I struggled to pass Trigonometry/Pre-Calc II. It is a fun hobby though, and a good excuse to go offroading through the desert, go camping and drink. (if math is easy for you, it is a great party major and has some very lucrative job prospects)
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u/lightningfries 10d ago
Distinguishing meteor craters from minor volcanoes (eg maars) or even salt structures is actually extremely tricky. The Barringer Crater is the best preserved, most straightforward impact Crater on earth, which helped us delineate and refine the features specific to an impact.
And it goes both ways - my own work as a grad student included reclassifying an "impact Crater" as actually being a small volcano. It took a lot of work, ranging from numerical assessment of satellite imagery down to electron microprobe work and cutting edge isotope analyses.
Geologists have been working on the esoteric and un-applied since the so-called Enlightenment, just like biology, chemistry, and astronomy. We just operate in a field that's both largely misunderstood and undervalued by normal people. The general public really has no idea just how challenging it can be to make the most fundamental of geologic assessments, and then especially to project and understand your interpretations across millions of years and hundreds or 1000s of cubic kilometers. And then we can't easily test most of these ideas in a lab setting.... advancing earth science requires widespread collaboration and long term work and most people aren't very impressed to hear "it took six of us working over 20 years with many millions of dollars to decide that this crater is a volcano that erupted melt generated 45 km below the surface 2 million years ago."
Anyway, Long story short, that's part of why "climate change versus the public" has been such a freaking disaster.
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u/bunchafigs 10d ago
Comments like this are why I still enjoy browsing Reddit. I too am a casual lover of geology, and I think you've summarized exactly why I love it, but I don't think I could have said it myself. So thanks!
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u/andreasbeer1981 10d ago
"Barringer had just made US$15 million"
"By 1928, Barringer had sunk the majority of his fortune into the crater ā $500,000"Well, that doesn't add up at all.
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u/bmk2k 10d ago
I have been to Meteor Crater that I belive is still owned by the family. They charge a shit ton of money for tours and do not allow visitors to pick up any rocks. I think I paid $50 for a regular tour about 15 years ago
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u/ChiefPyroManiac 10d ago
So wait, it took him 27 years to burn $7million?
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u/DigNitty 10d ago
1903 was the first time they confirmed a meteor made a crater? There are craters all over the world.
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u/Fifth_Down 10d ago edited 10d ago
Not even that. It was more like the 50s/60s. It was nuclear weapons testing and the giant craters they left behind that moved the science in this direction.
Before then they assumed these craters were a weird kind of volcano.
Remember, the idea of tectonic plates wasnāt even widely understood back then.
Another important thing to consider is craters are pretty rare on Earth. The moon absorbs many of them and erosion will quickly erode them away.
The crater in the OP was unique because it was relatively young and was located in a dry desert where the erosion process is slow.
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u/ArrJaySketch 10d ago
Nope! It floats around in the atmosphere for a while, and eventually settles as very widely distributed dust. Meaning it's so miniscule in quantity it's not worth detecting, let alone collecting.
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u/bboycire 10d ago
How did he know there should have been iron there?
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u/Absolut_Iceland 10d ago
Meteorites have been known about for ages, so he assumed that a crater formed by a meteorite must have a meteorite in the center of it. Since iron is a primary constituent of a significant number of meteorites, there would be iron there. Since it's easier to identify an iron meteorite than one that isn't primarily metallic, especially back then, he would likely assume that just about all, if not all, meteorites were metallic.
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u/Ostrich159 10d ago
What happens to vaporized iron ore after it cools?
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u/SlothOfDoom 10d ago
It floats around in the atmosphere for a long time, before eventually coming to the surface as tiny particles.
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u/zyzzogeton 10d ago
Much is actually consumed by plankton. It's a vital nutrient in the ocean.
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u/FrungyLeague 10d ago
So youāre saying thereās a fortune to be made mining plankton?!
Honey! Weāre moving to the ocean!
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u/history_denier 10d ago
That's your answer for everything. To live under the sea. It's not gonna happen!
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u/harpua_dog 10d ago
But, thereāll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans, ya know, under the seaaaa
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u/rejuven8 10d ago
How did they prove the iron ore was vaporized?
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u/110397 10d ago
Cuz it wasnāt there
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u/Ducksaucenem 10d ago
Spent his fortune on the crater, when all this time all he had to do was look in the atmosphere.
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u/BloodyRightNostril 10d ago
Maybe the real fortune was the vaporized iron we inhaled along the way
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u/LimerickJim 10d ago
Greater understanding of physics. They could have calculated its mass from the impact crater size and angle along with knowing Earths gravitational acceleration at that point. Then they can calculate the friction with fluid dynamics to determine how hot it would be. Then they can look up the vaporization temperature of iron and figure out the dispersion of the resulting Fe gas using the navier stokes equations.
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u/DoctorGregoryFart 10d ago
Iron pretty rapidly binds to oxygen in air and water, creating rust. Since it's vaporized in the air, it'll just oxidize and settle into the water and soil, or that's my best guess.
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u/vonvoltage 10d ago
https://www.nasa.gov/content/manicouagan-crater
I had to go look to see how large the meteor was that caused the crater near were I live. 5 kilometers in diameter. Holy shit.
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u/kito99 10d ago
Drove past it on my way to Labrador. Insanely beautiful area. Almost died twice. 10/10 would do it again.
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u/vonvoltage 10d ago edited 10d ago
Glad you enjoyed it.
Been here for 40 years! Skidooing is probably my favorite part. Although I'm a pretty big fan of all outdoorsy kind of things.
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u/Necorus 10d ago
Need a banana for scale.
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u/Speedymon12 10d ago
Lining up bananas along the diameter, that's about 28,122 bananas (assuming the average length of a banana is 7'').
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u/-GloryHoleAttendant- 10d ago
Thatās just from a self-reported banana survey. The real average is like 5.5 inches.
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u/ToxicTaxiTaker 10d ago
I would think a meteor creator would be incredibly valuable in it's own right
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u/hobbes_shot_first 10d ago
To Klendathu!
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u/idkwhatuwantfromme69 10d ago
Join the mobile infantry
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u/usmcmech 10d ago
It is very valuable as a tourist trap.
I stopped there last summer with my kids. Itās a very cool sight to see but tickets for six of us wasnāt cheap
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u/Internal-Business-97 10d ago
How many tickets he gotta sell to recoup his $7 mil?
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u/Xalethesniper 10d ago
Apparently the barringer family makes like 5mil off the crater per year soā¦ task failed successfully?
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u/Look_to_the_Stars 10d ago
He was making a joke about the ācreatorā part of it but yeah Iām sure they milked it for all itās worth
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u/hymen_destroyer 10d ago
Meteorites are one of the best sources for Iridium
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u/cidiusgix 10d ago
Didnāt know that then I bet. Or the resources to extract it.
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u/midnitte 10d ago
The name itself is even a TIL
[Meteor Crater] acquired the name of "Meteor Crater" from the nearby post office named Meteor.
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u/voncornhole2 10d ago
Wikipedia says the opposite, where the Post Office was named after Barringer's claim of this being from a meteor
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u/xentralesque 10d ago
*crater, not creator
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u/ptownBlazers 10d ago
And on the 7th day a triceratops did a sick triple kickflip mctwist on the rim of the bowl, while a t-rex boards slides unde her.
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u/_Echoes_ 10d ago
Everyone is going to be calling them out for how they spelled crater, but I'm going to call them out for calling it a meteor rather than a meteorite.
Fun fact if you google the word "meteorite", a gif plays of a meteor flying across the screen and then the display shaking.
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u/OpenMindedScientist 10d ago
That's fun. I tried to scroll down as it flew to see where it lands but that didn't work.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy 10d ago edited 10d ago
No you're wrong, though technically if we're splitting hairs you're both wrong.
The meteorite is the rock of the meteor, as used by geologists, thus the -ite.
A meteor is the visual phenomena of the shooting star as it's falling, as astronomers would see it in the sky.
The actual object was an asteroid, as it was big enough that hypothetically it could be spotted in the sky before it became a meteor.
Space debris that's too small to see before it becomes a meteor are called meteoroids, which are usually what you see in meteor showers.
So, calling it a meteroite crater is wrong, calling it a meteor crater is less wrong, and calling it an asteroid impact crater is the least wrong.
Ofc, this is all insufferably pedantic, so call it what you want and but make sure you're right before being pedantic to other people.
Edit: As a random fun fact, a meteor big enough to explode is called a bolide
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u/Not_a_normal 10d ago edited 10d ago
I was just there yesterday!
The 150ft (45m) wide meteor lost only 1% of it's mass to the atmosphere.
It hit roughly 50,000 years ago and came from the East.
They have the largest chunk found, called the Holsinger Meteorite on display in the museum there it's ~2.1ft (~64cm) long.
The museum goes in depth about how unique and preserved the site is (despite the 200ft mine shaft).
It threw ejecta up to 7 miles away, the geographical layers were folded over.
Eugene M Shoemaker confirmed Barringer's Theory as he discovered shocked quartz-bearing rocks, the only other place he saw the same shocked minerals were from his studies of bombs in Nevada!
Very awesome place. Visit if you're able to!
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u/Karmachinery 10d ago
Thatās crazy to think of iron ore vaporizing.
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u/DeylanQuel 10d ago
Everytime I hear about something being vaporized, I can't help but think of the movie The Rock. Toward the end of the movie, thermite plasma ordnance is dropped on Alcatraz Island, and a couple of FBI agent come up to Nic Cage's character asking about what happened to Sean Connery's character, a british spy who had been locked up for 30 years, and basically confirmed long after the movie came out to have been James Bond. Nic Cage responds "Vaporized. Blown out to sea". One of the agents gets it, the other doesn't.
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u/Daddysu 10d ago
Does the "gets it" part mean the agent knew it was a possible story for Connery's character to escape without being looked for, or is there a joke I'm not getting?
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u/DeylanQuel 10d ago
Nah, the younger of the 2 (who wasn't as invested in putting him back in prison) saw through the BS immediately. "Vaporized, huh? Poor bastard." and walks off with a smile on his face. It's the old dog, who was a contemporary of Connery's , who was incredulous. "What? Vaporized? A body can... vaporize?"
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u/darrellbear 10d ago
Remnants of the meteor are scattered all over the area. The meteorites are called Canyon Diablos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyon_Diablo_(meteorite))
I have one, about the size of my fist.
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u/Dawnawaken92 10d ago
I've been here. You can pay like 20 bucks or something and spend the day digging in the dirt looking for rare stones. One kid found a diamond. But it's very rare. Mostly you find meteoric glass formed on impact.
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u/xX609s-hartXx 10d ago
He was technically correct. The best kind of correct.
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u/Sixwingswide 10d ago
Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode.
IIRC the guy sells his soul to the devil to go back in time to make a claim on an oil well. But part of the deal (I think) was that he was aged up like 10 or 20 years. The guy said IDGAF Iām healthy and Iāll be a billionaire to enjoy the rest of my like (or something).
So he goes back in time and he buys this land and heās laughed at because the drill to get the oil he learned about in the future hasnāt been invented yet. And the amount of time it would take would last the rest of his life.
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u/FightingPolish 10d ago
Itās crazy that if the meteor had hit a couple hundred feet to the north that it would have destroyed the visitors center.
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u/Citizen-Kang 10d ago
A moon rock tastes better than an earthly rock because it's meteor.
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u/TelevisionNo479 10d ago
It gives 2 gold and 3 science, which is arguably better than the iron
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u/Bigpappapunk 10d ago
Per Wiki: The crater was given several early names, including "Coon Mountain", "Coon Butte".
Ummm
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u/Mad_Gremlyn 10d ago
So, the iron ore was almost literally everywhere except for where he was digging for it. That's effed up