There are not many intact meteor impact craters on Earth’s surface—erosion usually wipes them away pretty quickly. I had previously visited an impact crater at Tswaing in South Africa (diary here: www.dailykos.com/...)
Just a few days ago I got to visit Meteor Crater, near Winslow AZ. It is about the same size as Tswaing but is much younger and therefore much better preserved.
The first written reference to the crater is in 1871, when a US Army scout found it—it was referred to as “Franklin’s Hole”. For the next thirty years it was assumed to be an old volcanic crater. Then in 1902 a mining engineer from Philadelphia named Daniel Barringer visited the site, and concluded that it was not volcanic and contained no igneous rocks, but was most likely a meteor impact. At that time almost nothing was known about impact craters, so nobody took him seriously. But Barringer not only thought the crater had been caused by a meteorite, but concluded that the impactor was still there buried beneath the surface, and he could become rich by mining its iron and nickel. So he filed a mining claim and dug a number of drillholes to find it. After thirty years of searching, he went broke, having found nothing. (Alas, he was only half-right—the crater was an impact, but there was no buried meteorite. It had exploded on impact.)
Since Barringer had mined the claim for ten years, he had received legal title to the land, and when he died in 1929, his children inherited what they thought was a big worthless hole in the ground. But in the 1930’s and 40’s tourists began showing up to see the crater, and the Barringer family began charging admission. They still own the crater today.
During this time, most geologists still considered the crater to be volcanic. But in 1960 NASA scientist Dr Eugene Shoemaker found shocked quartz in drill samples at the site, establishing conclusively that it was an impact site. Today, scientists estimate that the meteor was about 150 feet wide, hit at about 26,000 mph, and had the energy of a 20-megaton nuclear bomb. It struck about 50,000 years ago.
Here are some photos from my visit.