An asteroid strikes northern Arizona, the impact releasing energy equivalent to three-and-a-half million tons of TNT.
Probably one hundred feet (thirty meters) in diameter, weighing sixty-three thousand metric tons and traveling five to ten miles per second (eight to sixteen kilometers per second), most of the object vaporizes, but blasts out a bowl-shaped depression six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) deep and 0.72 miles (1.2 kilometers) in diameter, surrounded by a rim one hundred and sixty feet (fifty meters) high.
Barringer Meteor Crater, as the impact site is called, is named for American engineer Daniel M. Barringer, who will theorize in 1905 that the crater was meteoric in origin.
