Like millions of others, I have been wowed by Meteor Crater just off of Interstate-40 between Flagstaff and Winslow in northern Arizona! Because it’s only 50,000 years old, it is still very much intact.
Google Earth image of Meteor Crater in Arizona. As you can see it’s huge!
And by accident, several decades ago, I stumbled upon another meteor impact crater in Odessa, Texas while on my way back from a camping trip at Big Bend National Park. Several years later I revisited that same crater with my dog Petey and featured it in this BLOG POST.
As you can see from this ground level view the Odessa Crater has been severely eroded and is surrounded by oil wells.
Even though the Odessa crater is not much older than the Arizona crater, it is heavily eroded and difficult to discern. In fact, since most known impact craters occurred millions of years ago, many of them have completely eroded away with the only remaining evidence being shatter patterns in the rock.
As one who likes to seek out anomalies, especially unusual holes in the ground, I spotted some unusual depressions several years ago on a topo map of southern New Mexico that I thought could be impact craters. But when I read The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan, I learned that those depressions were actually Maar volcanoes.
A Maar, in short, is a volcanic burp. They happen when rising magma encounters a water table to create enough super-heated steam to blast away everything above it. A great example of a Maar is the Kilbourne Hole in southern New Mexico. The Kilbourne Hole is featured in this BLOG POST and is also one of the Gold Star locations in Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico.
Google Earth view of the Kilbourne Hole.
The Kilbourne Hole from the ground. It’s more than a mile to the other side.
