S to Meteor Crater in Arizona. today Meteor Crater is t famousimpact site on Eartourist attraction. In t didn’t receivemany visitors and ill often referred to as Barringer Crater, after a aked a claim on it in 1903. Barringer believedt ter en-million-ton meteor, ed ation t une digging it out.
Una teor and everyt une, and t ty-six years, cutting tunnels t yielded nothing.
By tandards of today, crater researcrifle unsopicated, tosay t. tigator, G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University, modeledts of impacts by flinging marbles into pans of oatmeal. (For reasons I cannot supply,Gilbert conducted ts not in a laboratory at Columbia but in a el room.)Some concluded t ters s—in itself quite a radical notion for time—but t t. Mostscientists refused to go even t far. to ters volcanoes and noters t remained evident on Eart tributed to otreated as fluky rarities.
By time S Meteor Crater eam explosion. S undergroundsteam explosions—: t exist—but blast zones. Oneof jobs out of college o study explosion rings at ts nuclear test sitein Nevada. t MeteorCrater to suggest volcanic activity, but t tributions of otuff—anomalous fine silicas and magnetites principally—t suggested an impact from space.
Intrigued, o study t in ime.
orking first er e David Levy, Sematic survey of tem. t one ory in California looking for objects,asteroids primarily, ories carried t.
“At time arted, only sligire course of astronomical observation,” Ser in a television intervieronomers in tietury essentially abandonedtem,” tention urned to tars, the galaxies.”
S t tdeal more—than anyone had ever imagined.
Asteroids, as most people knos orbiting in loose formation in a beltbeter. In illustrations ting in a jumble, butin fact tem is quite a roomy place and teroid actually a million miles from its nearest neigely eroids tumbling t t to be probably not lessto be planets t never quite made it, oo ttling gravitational pull of Jupiter, hem from coalescing.