Like millions of others, I have been wowed by Meteor Crater just off of Interstate-40 between Flagstaff and Winslow in northern Arizona! Because it’s only 50,000 years old, it is still very much intact.
Google Earth image of Meteor Crater in Arizona. As you can see it’s huge!
And by accident, several decades ago, I stumbled upon another meteor impact crater in Odessa, Texas while on my way back from a camping trip at Big Bend National Park. Several years later I revisited that same crater with my dog Petey and featured it in this BLOG POST.
As you can see from this ground level view the Odessa Crater has been severely eroded and is surrounded by oil wells.
Even though the Odessa crater is not much older than the Arizona crater, it is heavily eroded and difficult to discern. In fact, since most known impact craters occurred millions of years ago, many of them have completely eroded away with the only remaining evidence being shatter patterns in the rock.
As one who likes to seek out anomalies, especially unusual holes in the ground, I spotted some unusual depressions several years ago on a topo map of southern New Mexico that I thought could be impact craters. But when I read The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan, I learned that those depressions were actually Maar volcanoes.
A Maar, in short, is a volcanic burp. They happen when rising magma encounters a water table to create enough super-heated steam to blast away everything above it. A great example of a Maar is the Kilbourne Hole in southern New Mexico. The Kilbourne Hole is featured in this BLOG POST and is also one of the Gold Star locations in Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico.
Google Earth view of the Kilbourne Hole.
The Kilbourne Hole from the ground. It’s more than a mile to the other side.
While on the subject of volcanoes, another interesting volcanic-related hole that’s way smaller than the Kilbourne Hole is a Volcanic Vent (or Blow Hole) along the route of Hike 33 (Twin Hills) in the 3rd edition of 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Albuquerque. The vent is on the side of an old volcano west of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The Vent is a bit of a challenge to reach, but when you do get there it’s very cool. But because the hole seems to have no bottom, it’s a bit spooky to stand too close to the edge. So watch your step.
Looking down at the vent from the drone.
The vent from the ground looking eats toward Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Another huge hole in the ground is Burke’s Garden (sometimes referred to as God’s Thumbprint) that is right on the edge of the Appalachian Trail in southwest Virginia. I first saw it when I did my end-to-end hike on the Appalachian Trail over 25 years ago and wondered at the time if it was an impact crater. I later learned that Burke’s Garden is actually a collapsed anticline where softer underlying rock eroded away to cause the harder upper levels of rock to fall into the void and is featured it in this recent BLOG POST.
Returning to impact craters, if you are interested there are plenty of sources on the Internet on where you can find them. A few months ago while on a road trip, the dogs and I made a stop to check out one of those impacts – the Kentland Dome near the town of Kentland in northwestern Indiana. The town is located at the intersection of U.S. Highway 41 and U.S. Highway 24 and is in an area that was “bulldozed” flat over and over again during the Ice Age. And no matter which way you look, you’ll see unending cornfields spreading out all the way to the horizon.
It’s unending cornfields in every direction.
The Kentland Dome less than three miles east of town on U.S. Highway 24. You’ll know you’re there when you see an active quarry on the south side of the highway. Unless you can get a peek inside the quarry, there is not much to see other than flat ground and unending cornfields.
The quarry
Looking back towards Kentland from the quarry.
As you can see, the land has been “bulldozed” flat by the Ice Age!
But all of the rock being quarried should be more than 1000 feet below the surface. And if you do get a peek inside, you’ll see that not only is rock near the surface but what should be flat lying layers of rock has been faulted, folded, and in a few places tilted into an almost vertical position. That twisted and tilted rock probably poked above the surface before repeated glaciation shaved off any exposed rock. In short, the Kentland Dome is a true geologic anomaly.
This bedrock should be 1000 feet or more below the surface. But as you can see. the bedrock has been uplifted to the surface.
For many years geologists speculated that volcanism may have caused the anomaly. But with the presence of shatter patterns in the rock and further analysis, geologists are now in agreement that sometime more than 97 million years ago a huge meteorite hit the earth with such force, that rock layers over a thousand feet below the surface were buckled, cracked, and bounced up to the surface create the Dome we have today.
This “shattered” rock is right in front of the quarry office’s front door. The lines (almost like shock waves) and general grain of the rock is evidence of a severe impact.
With rock so close the surface, the Kentland Dome has been quarried since the 19th Century. Since my visit was a spur of the moment stop, I was not able to get permission to tour the inside of the quarry. But I did have my drone and managed to find a few vantage points outside of the quarry to get some idea of what the meteor created.
Flat lying rock does not bounce up to the surface or become tilted and twisted like this unless there was a major impact.
The bottom line is that, whether you care about geologic anomalies or not, you can always find something interesting, even in the middle of a featureless cornfield, when you adopt the mindset of Wandering! You’ll also find that developing a wide range of interests can turn a tedious station-to-station road trip into a Wandering adventure where you’ll constantly be finding something new to check out the entire way.