These conclusions led Barringer to put together investment capital to fund drilling at the crater in order to extract the iron ore he believed was at the bottom of it.
This was later disproved by Daniel Moreau Barringer, who, though lacking credentials in the field of geology, was convinced that the mixture of rock and iron found in material deposited at the crater’s edge meant that the crater had been created by a meteorite. The first geologist to study the crater, Grove Karl Gilbert, came to the erroneous conclusion that the crater was created due to volcanic activity. However, as temperatures increased, the lake bed dried up and came to resemble what we see today. Initially, a lake formed on the bottom of the crater. This previously forested area was home to giant ground sloths, mastodons, and mammoths, many of which perished during and after the impact. At the time of impact, the area where the crater is now found was far cooler and wetter. The crater that formed as the result of this explosion ended up measuring three quarters of a mile in width and 750 feet in depth. While most of the meteor melted on impact, it also created a mist of fine metal that spread for a mile in each direction across the landscape. The Barringer crater can trace its origins to a meteor that struck the Arizona desert approximately 50,000 years ago with a force equivalent to 2.5 million tons of TNT.
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