D.M. Barringer and That Crater
By James Tobin

It has been almost a hundred years since the first recognition of a terrestrial impact crater. Geologists now have many benchmarks to help in identification, also instrumentation undreamed of when the first investigators hiked up the slopes of Coon Mountain in Central Arizona. Its impact origin took more than two decades to gain general acceptance, but by the end of the 1920s both the good scientific evidence and some of the misconceptions of Meteor Crater were being looked for elsewhere. And the information was spreading from crater to crater.

When Groves Karl Gilbert made his investigation of the crater in 1891 for the U. S. Geological Survey it took him three days to go by horse and wagon from Flagstaff. It had taken him about the same amount of time to make the entire trip by train from Washington D.C. Arizona was in many ways still the unsettled Wild West. D.M. Barringer, who staked four claims on the property, would be plagued by the harshness and difficulties of the region throughout his years of work.

During the first years in Arizona, Barringer described all the crater's major features. He recognized its impact altered rocks and strata, measured in detail the tilt and displacement of that strata. He photographed and recorded his findings.

By 1908, only five years after acquiring the property, Barringer had turned Meteor Crater into a massive undertaking. The original maps and drawings of the crater have been reproduced many times. I offer one of them again, because of the amount of information Barringer included on it. This map was the first page of his paper to the National Academy of Science, which he read during their Autumn Meeting at Princeton University on November 16, 1909.

As this map indicates there were two camps, each with several buildings. The upper camp which was on the north slope, and a lower camp which was down in the bottom of the crater. The original horse whim used in digging of the first shaft had been replaced with machinery and a large shaft house. Sometimes missed is the blacksmith shop which was next to the shaft house. Much of the machinery and supplies were lowered into the crater on a wench and cable setup powered like most of the equipment by steam. Both the water and the oil for the boiler were supplied by pipelines from tanks on the crater's rim. The water itself came from Canyon Diablo by pipeline. The river had been dammed and turned into a reservoir and the water was pumped from there to the crater. As the note on the map indicates one of the tanks of water had a volume of 54,000 gallons. There were at least three tanks for water and two tanks for oil at the crater itself.

There was by 1909 a museum on the crater's north rim which was one of only three locations in the world with a complete collection of the crater's specimens. One of the other locations as it turned out was the Guyot Laboratory of Princeton. Barringer challenged the audience at the reading of his paper to look at the materials there. The last location was the U.S. National Museum, in Washington D.C. This was where G. P. Merrill was posted and where the studies for Merrill's 1908 paper had been done. It was a paper widely read and used by researchers at other craters. It would be referred to in the paper by the University of Adelaide party at the Henbury craters in 1932. For the descriptive information about Meteor Crater, Merrill had been borrowed heavily from the published works of Barringer and Tilghman.

The work at the Arizona crater would continue for more than two decades, even beyond Barringer's death in 1929. But, even by the time of his 1909 paper there had already been 28 holes drilled into the floor of the crater. Fourteen of these revealed nickel iron oxide material at various depths below 450 feet. At the same time the numbered shafts at the crater had already reached into the forties. Add to this the dozens of trenches and pits being dug almost constantly into the ejecta blanket and this becomes a staggering project.

Though his goal was to find a vast body of valuable ore, Barringer never did. Even by the time of the 1909 paper (his second of four major papers on the crater) he was well aware of the arguments for vaporization of the body on impact. Perhaps it was the intense desire to find the meteorite that clouded his judgment, but it was to be a misconception he never gave up. It would also be something other researchers elsewhere would bring to their investigations as well. At the Henbury craters, the last two of three suggestions made by A.R. Alderman of the University of Adelaide for continued work at Henbury related to locating, then drilling and prospecting the masses when found.

Alderman wrote:

(2) That use be made of geophysical methods in an attempt to locate the position of masses of meteoric iron in any of the craters. The locality, the type of country-rock, and the nature of the material to be located, seem most ideally suited to the use of such methods.

(3) That if the position of a mass of iron be located by geophysical means, boring operations could then be proceeded with advantageously. Boring or drilling would certainly be of great value in prospecting the main craters. In some of the smaller ones it is possible that the meteoric material might be revealed by actual digging.

Much of the effort at Meteor Crater was a disaster financially, but out of the effort came scientific discoveries. The U.S. Smelting drill hole on the south rim was in every way such a financial disaster, costing them approximately $175,000. The story is well known _ lost drill tools, lost months of work to recover them and two years to drill one hole. Yet in the end Barringer was satisfied that they had drilled deeply into part of a large piece of meteoritic material. He stated in his final paper to the Academy of Natural Sciences, March, 1923, that the drill had passed through "about thirty feet of undoubted meteoric material. . ." It is hard to read the story of this drill hole and not have the same old question arise: "What did U.S. Smelting (renamed the Crater Mining Company) drill through?" The samples from the last hundred feet were said to "show a very strong nickel test." Also, after these positive nickel tests it was reported that a "hard object" fell in against the side of the bit and wedged it solid. These drilling tools were abandoned and bypassed. Soon after this the drilling was into material so hard only a few inches of progress could be made during a workshift. The drill tools were dulled and damaged by the material. The only country rocks at the crater are sandstones and limestone and they should not have damaged the drill tools. The mystery of this material may remain unanswered for no cores were ever taken from this hole. But the material brought up by the drill was "very black, very heavy with pieces of greenish metal showing." At 1,376 feet the drill bit stuck for the last time in this material. Weeks of effort could not free it and on November 15, 1922 the hole was abandoned.

It is clear that explosion craters result in volatilization, and this was the case at Meteor Crater. A magnet in the soil around the crater clearly reveals where most of the mass went. It became the abundant microscopic spheres and grains of metal and oxide. But, something is down there for me at the bottom of the U. S. Smelting hole, as it was for Barringer. Unlike him though, I'm not sure what, but certainly it is meteoritic in some way.

Meteor Crater in Arizona has been poked and drilled and dug into about as much as any feature on our planet. And after the passage of time little evidence remains of the early explorations. Some timbers cascade down the talus walls, bits of abandoned machinery still rest on the floor. But, the science done seventy to ninety years ago spread fast and remains until the present. At Henbury, Odessa, Wabar, and other craters where the impact theory was building piece by piece, much of that building was based on the work from the early years at Meteor Crater.

James Tobin is science editor for the Southern California publication, The South Bay Magazine, and has written a book on Meteor Crater.