Meteor Crater is located between Winslow and Flagstaff Arizona, USA. I was lucky enough to have visited Meteor Crater when I was out west in Febuary of 1999. (All pictures were taken using a 24mm wide Angle lens.)
Roughly 50,000 years ago, a gigantic meteor
came plummeting towards the Earth at a speed
of nearly 45,000 miles per hour. The meteoric
mass, weighing millions of tons, came crashing
through The Earth's atmosphere with a near
verticle decent.
The meteor impacted the Earth with the
explovsive force of 15,000,000 tons of TNT.
The impact threw over 300,000,000 tons of rock
and meteorite back into the air. Which then came
crashing back down to form a bunch of secondary
craters. The largest piece of meteorite found in
the area, weighs 1,406-lb which is on display at
the Meteor Crater Museum.
Meteor Crater as it sits now, (570 ft deep,
almost a mile across and over 3 miles in
circumference) is Deep enough to engulf a
60-story building. The floor of the crater
alone is large enough to hold 20 football fields.
The topographical terrain of Meteor Crater so
closely resembled that of the Moon and other
Planets, NASA designated it one of the official
training sites for the Apollo Astronauts.
