The Odessa Crater
Published on Sep 17, 2006 at 12:17 pm.
6 Comments.
Filed under meteors, travel.
If you are travelling through west Texas on I-20, there’s a great place to stop just west of Odessa. It is a hole in the ground. While that might not sound exciting, this hole was made by a meteorite impact some 50,000 years ago. This crater is really pretty easy to get to. There’s a sign on the interstate telling you where to exit, and signs along the short road to the crater. Best of all, it is free!
Earth gets hit by meteors all the time. Several hundred tons of stuff runs into Earth every day. However, big meteors are fairly rare. The body making this hole in the ground was a large chunk of iron probably somewhere on the order of 30 feet across. It hit with the force of a hydrogen bomb. The meteorite struck the ground with enough energy to shatter itself and the ground, vaporize itself, and create an explosion big enough to excavate close to 100,000 cubic meters of material, creating a crater about 100 feet deep and over 500 feet wide. Several smaller pieces (still several feet across) broke off of the main body and created a handful of other small craters in the vicinity.
At this point, I guess that I should point out that technically, these bodies are meteors only when they are zipping through the atmosphere. Flying through space, they are called meteoroids, and if they hit the ground, they are meteorites. So, really this should be the Odessa Meteorite Crater, but I didn’t name it!
Then time passed. Wind and rain blew and washed material into the crater, starting to fill it up. When the crater was found many years later, no one knew anything about meteorite craters, and so it was susptected of being all sorts of other things (volcanic crater, underground gas explosion, etc). It wasn’t until the 1920’s that geologists recognized it as a meteorite impact structure. The land was owned by the Texas & Pacific Railroad. In 1979, the crater and surrounding land was donated to Ector County, which turned it into a public park. Up until just a few years ago, all that was there were some picknic tables, a metal awning, and some wooden signs and display boards telling a few things about the crater. 
Trails ran trough it. But just a few years ago, a very nice museum and visitor center was built on site. Now the crater even has a permanent care taker. It is well worth the time to visit if you happen to be in the area.
Now, I don’t want you to think that this is super impressive as craters go. It is a medium sized crater, and unfortunately over the last 50,000 years, erosion has mostly filled it in. It is now only a shallow depression about 6 feet deep with a several foot high rim around it. But, it is a meteorite crater! And that alone makes it cool to see. After all, how many people can say that they’ve stood in the middle of a meteorite crater, even an unimpressive one?
The original iron meteorite was blown to pieces in the impact, scattering iron bits all over the county. I have one of those little bits found some distance from the impact crater. About the time that geologists were realizing that this was an impact crater, Daniel Barringer was trying to mine much larger and better preserved crater in Arizona to get at the iron below. However, that impactor, too, was blown to bits in the impact, and there was no iron in that crater — it was scattered all over Arizona and the surrounding states. So a shaft was sunk 160 feet into the center of the Odessa crater in an attempt to find a giant iron meteorite there, too. As with Barringer Crater, there is no meteorite below the Odessa main crater (though meteorites were found beneath the smaller craters). The shaft consisted of about ten small “rooms” carved into rock with wooden stairs leading from up and down. In the 1950’s vandals burned the stairs, and now the shaft is covered.
The museum is open 9am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. There are trails and self guided tours through the crater itself. More information is available at their web site.
So, if you are in the area, go look at the big hole in the ground!
-Astroprof
Mary Jo on September 17, 2006 at 1:45 pm: 1
Wow — how interesting. And sounds worth a little side trip!
Astroprof on September 17, 2006 at 10:25 pm: 2
I think that this crater doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves because Odessa is pretty much the middle of nowhere.
Astroprof’s Page » Duck, it’s 2006 QM111! on September 24, 2006 at 1:46 pm: 3
[…] A week ago, I posted about a crater located here in Texas just west of Odessa. That crater was caused by something running into Earth. You can work out the mathematics of such an impact, and you find that the impacting body may have exploded with the equivalent force of 100 to 200 megatons of TNT. To put this into perspective, this is nearly 50 times larger than a “typical” hydrogen bomb. The largest thermonuclear device every tested was the Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961, which had a yield of 50 megatons. But fortunately, these things don’t hit all that often. But, would we see one coming? […]
nSpace01 on October 16, 2007 at 2:17 pm: 4
In exploring the Odessa area via “Google Earth”, there are many craters visible (almost as many as there are nuclear craters in the Nevada Nuc Test Site). Some as large as 3 miles in diameter. At some point in time, probibly in the same time frame as the “Odessa Crater” (50,000 years ago.
nSpace01 on October 16, 2007 at 2:28 pm: 5
Continued…….
a shotgun blast of material hit the earth in the area surrounding Odessa. I have found no other area as yet with this much visible cratering….
Astroprof’s Page » Tunguska, one century later on June 30, 2008 at 4:11 pm: 6
[…] meteorite, the bigger the explosion when it hits the ground, and the bigger the crater. Earth has plenty of […]