The crater is named for Daniel Barringer, the first scientist to study it. The Barringer Crater is more than forty-five meters across. It is in the shape of an almost perfect circle. Scientists say the event that caused this hole took place about fifty-thousand years ago. In studying the crater, they found evidence that an object from space traveling at more than sixty-four thousand kilometers an hour crashed into the ground.
Scientists say the object was made of the metals iron and nickel.
It was about forty-five meters across and weighed several thousand tons. The rock from space that created the Barringer Crater hit the Earth with the force of about twenty-million tons of explosives. It caused tons of rock and dirt to be thrown into the air. Huge rocks fell back to earth for many kilometers around the huge hole. Some of these rocks are as large as houses.