The visitors center was built for the crater good
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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I'm sorry about that. You don't like Sergeant Brick-Angel?
Was he in a Japanese porn?
(It seems obvious, but I’m not sure he has enough hair.)
You can tell from what he hasn't got.
I went there IRL!!! It was cool
I went there, but they wanted to charge like 40 bucks a person to see the crater, so we left.
I find it incredibly weird that we, as people, respect it when someone says "That crater created by tons of falling space stuff many millions of years ago, is mine! No one can look at it, unless you pay me!". I mean, wtf? How does that make sense? What asswipe sold that crater at some point in history, and what gave them the fucking right?
Is the (w)hole damn thing surrounded by a fence?
I'm not sure if it's all fenced but the entire thing (including the road) is on private land, so walking around it is trespassing.
There's only 1 road going there and it ends at the visitor's center, and impact crater walls are higher than surrounding terrain, so unless you get past the visitor's center all you see is a hill.
Yes, the entire crater is surrounded by a fence and on private property. It's not worth the admission price just to see a crater imo. It's a national landmark, not a national/state park. Unfortunately that designation means very little other than the owner being eligible for some tax breaks so long as they keep it preserved. I find it insane that such a landmark wouldn't be taken over by the state for preservation.
That's a long drive to turn around. The museum and visitors center was more interesting than the Crater.
It was very gusty winds when I visited, so only a brief time outside observing the Crater. There was a large hunk of meteorite inside, an educational lecture, and a museum. It was one of the highlights of my trip but it's not for everyone.
I recall someone else turning around and saying it was too expensive when I was purchasing my tickets.
The drive was so gusty that the wind was pushing the car while I was driving it. What a day to remember!
That's a bit steep.
Like, I never went there, and just saw the crater for free.
*Laughing Track*
Is it not possible to pull over just short of the visitor center and see it from there? I guess you won’t really be able to see down into it?
The whole thing is on private land, including the road, so it just looks like a hill from anywhere you can get for free.
It was real cool. I am figuratively agreeing but also literally agreeing. I spent a winter break in that area and the whole desert was covered in snow.
Did you manage to avoid the meteor impact?
I did! But apparently many others fell into the Crater and got stuck.
Did you see the spaceman?
Imagine working at the visitor center when no one's coming, then one day you have a massive meteor impact and suddenly have something worth visiting in the vicinity of your visitor center
you could say that their luck has been.. cratered
So does the rock itself disintegrate on impact or is it under the crater?
Fun fact a rich guy once bought the mining rights to a meteorite impact crater believing that it would be an easy source of pure iron to mine since most meteorites are primarily iron, but after digging for hundreds of feet and finding no iron the project ran out of money and went bust, because meteorites disintegrate into first a liquid iron, which then oxidised very rapidly and becomes dust and small chunks which settle in an ejecta pattern around the impact zone, sometimes many miles wide, and this thin layer is fairly quickly eroded away, so there's no usable iron nor a meaningful amount of oxide remaining.
Smaller meteorites often land intact, as their surface area allows for meaningful atmospheric friction to slow them down, and these are chunks of iron, but larger than about the size of a large van, the meteorite is usually obliterated.
Entry angle can allow for exceptions, IE if a meteorite just grazes the atmosphere but still slows down enough to suborbital speeds, it can land as big chunks, but even these get scattered over hundreds of kilometres. Any impact steeper than about 20 degrees and larger than a large van is usually carrying so much momentum at ground level that it hits at several, and possibly tens of kilometres per second, which liquifies and scatters it widely.
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That was a fun a fact.
most meteorites are primarily iron
I have to note that this is not correct. Chondrites make up the vast majority of meteorites, and even the most iron-rich chondrites contain much less than 50% iron by weight.
I haven't been to Barringer Crater and I don't know all the sweet, gory details of the big bolide that made it, but LPI seems to have a nice summary. The estimated 30 tons of meteoritic iron retrieved from the site certainly isn't very much, and I have heard a variant of Agent641's story before, so I'll refrain on commenting there.
I'm a little sad thinking about all that oxidized iron, though. On Luna that stuff gets reduced instead, so that the regolith is peppered with little spheres of iron. Of course, here, we don't get the little balls of iron, or much in the way of intact craters at all... damn it, we could use a few more.
Sighs Earth. For all the predators and the continent-busting rifts here, this place just isn't very hardcore sometimes.
I wonder what would happen if a large one came in directly perpendicular to the ground at high speed (for a meteor). Like the atmosphere is really pretty thin and that trajectory would have the least exposure to it.
It probably wouldn't change the outcome much. Meteorites usually have a relative velocity to earth of 8-50 kilometres per second. At those speeds, it moves much faster than a ballistic missile, and those things haul ass. Whether entering at 25 degrees or 90, it would instantly turn the air to plasma and pass through the troposphere and hit the ground in just a few seconds.
I'm not a craterologist but my understanding is an impact like this is going to chemically change the asteroid and the ground. So partly disentigrates and kinda becomes part of the ground (idk if that counts as under)
It's alright, we already got a craterologist's answer.
It's basically like setting of a nuclear explosion at that site. A big one, getting close to the Tsar Bomba. Everything nearby including the meteor turns to plasma and vapor, and that creates a shockwave that blows out everything nearby not instantly vaporized.
the impact velocity is so high that the kinetic energy is large enough that it instantly vaporizes the whole asteroid on impact.
Yeah but now that poor visitor center is ruined. People went there to see the vast open desert, not some hole made by space garbage! I hope the government can bail them out
Quick, somebody start a gofundme to get that rock launched back into space where it belongs!
Please send any sand you can spare to the visitor center. Together we can fill that hole
Okay jokes aside was it even desert when the impact happened? Like I know of an impact in Germany that happened so long ago that Germany was a jungle.
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Thanks for the big circle. Otherwise no one would get the joke.
What joke?
if the center was there, the impact wouldve still obliterated the buildings.
Obviously the meteor was finely tuned to avoid hitting the visitor center
Correlation vs causation
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