The second most being the pixels.

I find it incredibly weird that we, as people, respect it when someone says "That crater created by tons of falling space stuff many millions of years ago, is mine! No one can look at it, unless you pay me!". I mean, wtf? How does that make sense? What asswipe sold that crater at some point in history, and what gave them the fucking right?

Is the (w)hole damn thing surrounded by a fence?

That's a long drive to turn around. The museum and visitors center was more interesting than the Crater.

It was very gusty winds when I visited, so only a brief time outside observing the Crater. There was a large hunk of meteorite inside, an educational lecture, and a museum. It was one of the highlights of my trip but it's not for everyone.

I recall someone else turning around and saying it was too expensive when I was purchasing my tickets.

The drive was so gusty that the wind was pushing the car while I was driving it. What a day to remember!

That's a bit steep.

Like, I never went there, and just saw the crater for free.

*Laughing Track*

Is it not possible to pull over just short of the visitor center and see it from there? I guess you won’t really be able to see down into it?

I did! But apparently many others fell into the Crater and got stuck.

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most meteorites are primarily iron

I have to note that this is not correct. Chondrites make up the vast majority of meteorites, and even the most iron-rich chondrites contain much less than 50% iron by weight.

I haven't been to Barringer Crater and I don't know all the sweet, gory details of the big bolide that made it, but LPI seems to have a nice summary. The estimated 30 tons of meteoritic iron retrieved from the site certainly isn't very much, and I have heard a variant of Agent641's story before, so I'll refrain on commenting there.

I'm a little sad thinking about all that oxidized iron, though. On Luna that stuff gets reduced instead, so that the regolith is peppered with little spheres of iron. Of course, here, we don't get the little balls of iron, or much in the way of intact craters at all... damn it, we could use a few more.

Sighs Earth. For all the predators and the continent-busting rifts here, this place just isn't very hardcore sometimes.

I wonder what would happen if a large one came in directly perpendicular to the ground at high speed (for a meteor). Like the atmosphere is really pretty thin and that trajectory would have the least exposure to it.

It's alright, we already got a craterologist's answer.

Please send any sand you can spare to the visitor center. Together we can fill that hole

I don't know when that crater happened but not far from it is the petrified forest. Which if you don't know is from trees falling into swamp water/mud and basically becoming rock. So at one point that area was a jungle/swamp as well.