Daniel Moreau Barringer was right about the great hole in northern Arizona and wrong about the treasure he expected beneath it. The mining engineer argued that an iron body from space had excavated the crater, challenging an influential volcanic explanation. He then spent more than two decades and much of his fortune drilling for a buried mass of meteoritic iron that did not exist.
His failed mining campaign did not by itself supply the final proof of impact. That arrived later, when scientists learned to recognize minerals altered by extreme shock. Barringer nevertheless changed the question. By insisting that the crater and the scattered meteorites belonged to a single collision, he helped turn an Arizona landmark into a foundation of impact-cratering science.
A Young Crater in an Old Landscape
Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, is about 1.2 kilometers wide and roughly 170 meters deep. Its rim rises around 45 meters above the surrounding Colorado Plateau. Modern work places its formation at approximately 56,000 years ago, although it has long been described more generally as about 50,000 years old.
The projectile was a metallic asteroid tens of meters across, composed mainly of iron and nickel. It broke apart to some degree during atmospheric passage, scattering fragments now called the Canyon Diablo meteorites. The main surviving mass did not simply lodge beneath the floor. Much of the object melted or vaporized when its kinetic energy was released in seconds, while small fragments were thrown around the surrounding landscape.
Dry conditions helped preserve the result. Although erosion has lowered the rim and sediment has accumulated inside, the crater retains overturned rock layers, ejecta blocks, and a comparatively crisp bowl. Its squared appearance reflects preexisting joints in the horizontal sedimentary rock, which influenced how the shock fractured and excavated the ground.
Why a Volcano Seemed Plausible
When geologist Grove Karl Gilbert investigated in the 1890s, impact cratering was not yet a mature field. Volcanic activity existed elsewhere in northern Arizona, and explosive steam was considered capable of producing a depression. Gilbert tested whether a large iron mass lay beneath the crater by looking for a magnetic anomaly. He found no compelling signal and favored a terrestrial explosion, even though meteorite fragments occurred nearby.
The test contained a hidden assumption: a crater-forming iron body should remain largely intact underground. Scientists did not yet understand that a high-speed collision could vaporize much of the projectile. The missing magnetic mass therefore seemed to argue against an impact when it actually reflected impact physics.
Barringer saw the evidence differently. Meteorite fragments were distributed around the crater, rock beds near the rim had been overturned, and shattered material was mixed in ways he believed a volcanic steam blast could not explain. He acquired mining claims, formed the Standard Iron Company, and published his case in the early 1900s.
The Search for a Buried Iron Fortune
Barringer’s science and business plan were inseparable. He estimated that millions of tons of valuable metal might remain beneath the crater floor, perhaps concentrated toward one side because the projectile had arrived at an angle. Crews sank shafts and drilled through broken rock, moving equipment and supplies into an isolated desert site. Boreholes repeatedly encountered pulverized material, water, and technical setbacks instead of an iron lode.
Over roughly 27 years, the venture consumed more than half a million dollars by contemporary accounts—an extraordinary personal and investor expense for the period. Each failure could be interpreted as a reason to drill somewhere else because the assumed underground body was large but its exact position was uncertain. Barringer continued even as the project’s commercial logic weakened.
In 1929, astronomer Forest Ray Moulton analyzed the event and concluded that the impactor would have released enough energy to disperse and vaporize most of itself. There was no giant meteorite waiting to be mined. Barringer died soon afterward, having secured growing respect for the impact explanation but never the metallic payoff that had financed his search.
Shocked Minerals Supplied the Decisive Test
The crater’s origin became conclusive through later comparisons with high-energy explosions and through microscopic mineral evidence. Eugene Shoemaker mapped the structure and showed that its overturned strata and ejecta followed an impact sequence. Researchers also identified coesite, a high-pressure form of silica, and microscopic deformation features in quartz. Such changes require pressures delivered almost instantaneously and cannot be explained by an ordinary volcanic steam eruption.
The site then became a reference point for identifying less obvious craters. A simple crater forms through compression, excavation, and modification: the projectile and target are violently compressed; material is thrown outward; then loosened walls slump and debris settles. Because Meteor Crater preserves these stages unusually well, features measured there have helped scientists interpret impacts on Earth, the Moon, and other rocky worlds.
Barringer’s legacy is consequently more complicated than a victory story. He correctly joined the meteorites, overturned beds, and crater into one event, yet his expectation of a recoverable iron body was based on faulty physics. The money lost in pursuit of that body exposed the very problem later science resolved. His crater became proof not because the drilling found the asteroid, but because the empty boreholes and shocked rocks revealed what a hypervelocity impact actually does.