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Meteor Crater, Arizona

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Meteor Crater, Arizona

Coordinates: 35 3 N 111 2 W

Diameter: 4,150 feet (1,265 m)

Each summer, movie screens nationwide (and increasingly world wide for that matter) are crowded with blockbuster flicks pitting man against other men, nature, and often alien life forms. Well, I think most people are pretty good at distinguishing science fiction from reality, but the truth is, planet Earth does get visitors from outer space every once in a while. Evidence of these occurrences is limited, but hard to miss. Take Arizona’s Meteor Crater for example. Here in the northeastern corner of the state, an iron-nickel meteorite traveling about 9.3 miles per second (15 kilometers per second) struck the Colorado Plateau about 50,000 years ago, displacing several hundred million tons of rock and soil in a matter of seconds. When the proverbial dust settled—which may have been many months or even years later—a crater 570 feet deep waited to be discovered and studied not by some muscle-bound action hero, but rather an inquisitive mining engineer.
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Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.

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