Discussion

Arizona's Meteor Crater is still revealing new secrets 50,000 years later

bilsbie: I always wondered why there aren’t a whole bunch of minerals from the asteroid inside the crater? Shouldn’t it be loaded with gold and such?

cratermoon: 1. The impact object was a nickel-iron meteorite. There's not much of anything else in those kinds of objects.2. Most of the impact object vaporized in the estimated 10MT release of energy.

cratermoon: The article doesn't mention any new secrets revealed.I visited it, and it's a decent place to visit once, but it's owned by the Barringer Crater Company and it kind of shows. The site really ought to be a National Park or similar.

dylan604: I was wondering if I was just having reading comprehension issues myself.TFA: These kinds of studies have led to the identification of, so far, of about 200 confirmed impact craters on Earth, Koeberl said. "Impact crater studies have actually grown in importance over the years and are an interdisciplinary effort. We encourage young researchers from all over the world to submit grant proposals,"So the new is that we can find more craters?

tw-20260303-001: Maybe there are. Buried deep under sediments.

dylan604: "The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 160 ft (50 m) across."[0]Not a lot of gold and such. It's not like the impact was going to fuse atoms of nickel-iron into gold.[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater