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WINSLOW, Ariz. — If you're traveling a few miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona, you'll see what appears to be a low, ragged hill on the horizon.
But it's not what it seems to be.
If you can get up the air, you can see it's an enormous, perfectly round hole in the earth — something big obviously hit it.
Clark Planetarium director Seth Jarvis said it was “an iron lump about the size of an apartment building. It impacted here about 50,000 years ago.”
It's a good thing no one was around in those days.
“It was an extremely violent impact,” Jarvis said. “It was the equivalent of several dozen times the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast.”
When he visited the Arizona Meteor Crater, Jarvis was repeatedly buttonholed by tourists.
“It’s amazing. I’ve never seen nothing like it,” said Jim McCulley, a tourist from Sparta, Tennessee.
“We’re just fascinated to see … it’s one of the most marvelous things on Earth,” tourist Karen McCulley said.
They wanted to know more about the stunning crater, nearly a mile wide and 550 feet deep.
“The fireball would basically have flash-vaporized, or at least set in flames, everything with about 5 miles of here,” Jarvis told them.
He then asked us to imagine what would happen if such a giant meteor — or asteroid — slammed into downtown Salt Lake City, roughly on top of Vivint Arena.
“The deadly, flatten-everything fireball blast destruction would go to the airport to the west, and there’d be nothing standing at the University of Utah to the east,” he said.
The suburbs would not be spared.
“The shock and fire and violence of that event would have affected the whole Wasatch Front,” Jarvis said.
But here's the really scary thing: the Arizona Meteor Crater is tiny compared to what could happen. Some asteroids are much, much bigger and are capable of creating a global disaster comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
“There are literally close to 2,000 potentially hazardous asteroids zipping around the solar system,” Jarvis said. “We’ve been dodging bullets and are just not aware of how lucky we’ve been over time.”
Jarvis takes the threat so seriously that he spends a lot of his time and energy teaching about it — and warning people that we need to be ready.
A massive iron meteorite will soon go on display at Clark Planetarium in a new exhibit that will be called Restless Planet. It weighs nearly a ton and was found in China hundreds of years after it fell to Earth.
“These meteorites are famous for being kind of rusty, so we’re using powdered walnut shell to blast the rust off the meteorite without hurting the meteorite,” Jarvis said.
The exhibit will also include the Asteroid Defense Game, created by the planetarium's design team. Now being tested, the game will give visitors a chance to defend Earth against asteroids.
The missiles, solar sails, laser blasters and nuclear weapons featured in the game are all actual weapons scientists have said could be used against incoming asteroids. But so far, no government has committed to do anything about it.
Jarvis hopes the new exhibit will teach everyone that if we aren't ready, it could be game over for planet Earth. Restless Planet is scheduled to open in October.
