They Lied to You About Arizona’s Meteor Crater

Every visitor to Meteor Crater reads fifty thousand years off the rim, and the newest science says that number does not hold. In this one I go through how we got it wrong three times over, the most respected geologist in America standing on that rim in 1895 and declaring it a steam explosion, and Daniel Barringer burning twenty six years and over six hundred thousand dollars drilling for iron that had already turned to vapour. The part that gets me is where the asteroid actually went, because more than eighty percent of it rose as a hot metal cloud and fell back as tiny iron spheres, so Barringer was drilling through his own treasure the whole time. I will be honest, my favourite detail in this whole story is that a fragment of that iron was later used to calculate the age of the Earth itself, which still stands at four and a half billion years. And there is driftwood sitting in a Grand Canyon cave a hundred miles north that may date to the exact same minute.
#archaeology #history