CHAPTER 1
IMPACT!
Itâs fifty thousand years ago, in the middle of a vast rolling plain near the future site of Flagstaff, Arizona. And high up in the sky, just on the edge of space, an asteroid half the size of a city block is hurtling toward this exact spot at 40,000 miles an hour.
For hundreds of millions of years this cold, jagged, half-million-ton piece of tumbling space metal has been orbiting around the Sun, staying in its own lane and not bothering anybody. But then some outside forceâa collision with another asteroid, or some subtle gravitational nudge from another planetâsent it off on a new path, a new orbit. That orbit over time has conspired to place this speeding asteroid and our own speeding Earth in the exact same spot in space at precisely the same moment. And soon, very soon, this asteroidâs traveling days will be over.
Earth isnât completely defenseless against this sort of attack from space. If this asteroid is actually going to hit the Earthâs surface intact, first it has a gauntlet to run. The asteroid has to make it through the atmosphere.
You wouldnât think the atmosphere would pose much of a problem for a flying space boulder. After all, itâs just a layer of air, and a pretty thin layer to boot. Proportionally, Earthâs atmosphere is thinner than the skin of an apple. But air is like water. If you do a graceful swan dive off the low board at the pool the water provides a gentle cushion; but if you do a hundred-mile-an-hour belly-flop off the Golden Gate Bridge, itâs almost like hitting concrete.
Same thing with this asteroid. Itâs a blunt object, with all the aerodynamic glide qualities of a blacksmithâs anvil, and itâs traveling twenty times faster than a rifle bullet. So when the asteroid hits the increasingly dense air of the atmosphere it gets some pushback. The air molecules in front of the asteroid canât get out of its way fast enough, and so the air in its path is radically compressed and heated up. Within seconds, temperatures on the asteroidâs previously frigid surface reach three thousand degrees and more, lighting up both the asteroid and the wall of shock-compressed air in front of it in a brilliant incandescent glow, and leaving a fiery tail of bright light miles long. At the same time, the tremendous pressure causes pieces of the asteroid to break off and fall toward the Earthâs surface on their own.
If our asteroid was smaller, or if it was made of rock instead of metal, the heat and pressure would probably destroy it, making it burn up or blow up before it ever reached the ground. Every day Earthâs atmosphere easily destroys millions of incoming pieces of space debris, creating meteors that flash in the night sky. Most of those pieces of space debris are tiny, the size of a grain of sand, but even the bigger pieces usually fail to survive the atmospheric gauntlet. Our atmosphere wraps around the Earth like a thin sheet of Kevlar, protecting us from assaults by minor intruders from spaceâwhich is another reason we should probably take better care of it.
But this asteroid of fifty thousand years ago is no grain of sand, no minor intruder. This asteroid is 150 feet wide, and itâs made of sterner stuff than rock. Itâs composed of almost pure nickel-iron, an incredibly heavy and strong alloy. A single cubic foot of itâabout the size of a 50-pound block of iceâweighs almost as much as a Harley-Davidson Sportster, and there are a million cubic feet of nickel-iron in this asteroid. Earthâs atmosphere does its best, but completely destroying this asteroid is an impossible order. Nothing is going to stop this thing now. In just a few seconds itâs going to slam into the Earthâs surface like a giant cosmic cannonball.
But before that happens, letâs freeze the asteroid in mid-plummetâsay, about twenty miles above the Earthâs surfaceâand take a look at what itâs about to hit.
Ground zero for the incoming asteroid is a patch of mile-high tableland in what is now known to geologists as the Colorado Plateau. The climate is wetter and cooler on this day than it will be in modern times, the land a little more lush. Juniper and piñon pine woodlands are interspersed with grass-covered savannahs, and the ground is riven with flash-flood gullies and small flowing streams.
There are no people here on this day. The best scientific evidence suggests that humans wonât arrive in North America for another thirty thousand years or so. Still, there is abundant animal lifeâand with one notable exception, much of the animal life would be familiar to us in modern times. There are beetles and sawflies and spiders, rattlesnakes and gopher snakes, pack rats, moles, and voles; in the air there are hawks and hummingbirds and swallows. The one notable exception is that on this day fifty thousand years ago the land is also populated with those largeâin some cases magnificently largeâand now extinct Late Pleistocene animals collectively known as megafauna.
One of them is a species of elephant-like mammoth known as Mammuthus columbiânamed for no particularly good reason after Christopher Columbusâa 13-foot-tall, 20,000-pound giant that grazes in matriarchal family groups in the grassy open meadowlands. Another is a species of mastodon, a slightly smaller distant cousin of the mammoth that browses on coniferous twigs in the forests. There are ten-foot-long giant ground sloths in the area, as well as an ancient type of camel appropriately known as Camelops hesternusâLatin for âYesterdayâs camel.â There are herds of horses and bison grazing and galloping on the plains, but the horses are smaller than modern-day horses, and the bison are bigger than the American buffalo of later erasâmuch bigger, with enormous horns that measure eight feet from tip to tip. There are predators lurking about as wellâpacks of fearsome dire wolves, and saber-toothed big cats known as Smilodons. In the air, soaring on the thermals, there are giant condor-like birds with wingspans of 16 feet.
Mammoths and mastodons, pack rats and rattlesnakes, sloths and swallows and Smilodonsâthese are what are waiting for the asteroid now poised above their heads. Mercifully, the creatures in the impact zone have no idea whatâs coming. They canât hear the sonic boom the asteroid creates as it bursts through the atmosphere, because the asteroid travels faster than the sound it makes. And if they happen to look up at the northwestern sky, all they see is a bright glow, with no indication that this blazing rock is coming directly at them. So there is no sense of impending doom, no panic, no stampeding terror.
Well, it would be nice if this peaceful, bucolic Late Pleistocene scene could continue. But since it canât, we might as well get it over with. So now we go back up and unfreeze our plummeting asteroidâand two seconds later it hits the Earth with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas.
The impact isnât an explosion in the conventional sense. Instead, the destructive force comes from kinetic energy. Every moving objectâa car on a freeway, a cue ball on a pool table, an asteroid hurtling through spaceâpossesses kinetic energy, and the heavier the object is and the faster itâs going, the more kinetic energy it has. As you can imagine, an asteroid that weighs hundreds of thousands of tons and is traveling at ten miles per second possesses an enormous amount of kinetic energyâand when it hits something it releases that energy with explosive force. To quantify that force, as a kind of shorthand scientists compare it to the energy released by a ton of TNT. The Hiroshima atomic bomb had the energy equivalent of about twelve thousand tons of exploding TNT. When our asteroid hits the ground, it releases the energy equivalent of some twelve million tons of TNT, or twelve megatons.
So even though the asteroid isnât a bomb, it might as well be. The impact shatters rocks a thousand feet below the surface and pulverizes millions of tons of stone into a fine, talc-like powder. The explosion peels up thick layers of ancient limestone and sandstone and folds them back on themselves, like a firecracker going off inside a stack of pancakes. It ejects almost two hundred million tons of rock into the air, hurling boulders the size of small houses hundreds of yards, and sending smaller pieces arcing upward in thousands of smoking contrails. A giant fireball starts rising into the sky, searing everything around it and creating a dusty brown mushroom cloud that reaches up to the stratosphere.
Obviously, any living thing in the asteroidâs immediate point of impactâevery tree, every bug, every Smilodon and Camelopsâis instantly reduced to the molecular level. And those creatures are the lucky ones; they never know what hit them. Other animals farther from the impact point are less fortunate.
The asteroidâs impact sends a shock wave radiating out in every direction, a burst of overpressure that causes internal organs to collapse and eardrums to burst and blood to bubble in veins. Thatâs accompanied by a blast of wind moving in excess of 1,200 miles per hourâan atmospheric disturbance for which the word âwindâ hardly seems adequate. This super-wind uproots trees, scours the ground bare of vegetation and sends everything in its path hurtling through the air in a maelstrom of debrisâboulders, pebbles, jagged shafts of broken tree trunks, dead or dying rattlesnakes, pack rats, giant sloths. Twenty-thousand-pound mammoths are sent skittering along the ground like tumbleweeds.
Within three miles of the impact site, no living creature on the ground survives. Farther out the effects start to diminish, but even ten miles away the blast still hits with hurricane force, pelting victims with rocks and small debris and shredding their hides like a sandblaster. As if that werenât bad enough, for miles around the ground is bombarded by falling chunks of the asteroid that sloughed off in the atmosphere, and by millions of pieces of molten nickel-iron and other materials that were thrown up by the impact and are now falling back to the ground. Itâs a lethal rain of rock and iron.
And then, within just a few minutes, itâs over, the only sound the whimpers and bellows of the wounded. Whatâs left is a 300-square-mile patch of ground that has been scorched and stripped bare. And at the center thereâs a blackened, smoldering, bowl-shaped hole in the earth, a crater almost a mile across and 700 feet deep, surrounded by a rim of displaced rock some twelve stories high.
Itâs an astonishing amount of destruction. And yet, thereâs something about this asteroid you should know. You should know that in the cosmic scheme of things, our asteroidâs violent collision with the Earth on this day fifty thousand years ago really isnât any big deal. Itâs not even all that unusual. The fact is that over the course of four and a half billion years, Earth has been hit millions of times by asteroids and comets as big as or bigger than this oneâin some cases many orders of magnitude bigger. Earth has been bombarded by hurtling space bodies the size of mountains and even small planets, with collisions so powerful they tilted the Earth on its axis, sent huge chunks of Earthâs surface flying into space and enveloped the globe in shrouds of fire and dust that wiped out most of its species.
Our relatively small asteroid has done none of those things. As tough as itâs been for a few mastodons and giant sloths in the impact zone, other creatures grazing thirty miles away survive the asteroidâs impact quite nicely; it doesnât even ruin their day. Within a few years, the blackened ground around the asteroid crater will be covered with new vegetation, and the animals will return. Except for the huge hole left in the ground, it will be almost as if it never even happened.
The bottom line is that by Earth-impacting-asteroid standards, our little asteroid of fifty thousand years ago has actually been something of a runt, a piddler, a weak sister.
So why do we care about this particular asteroid? What makes it so special?
The answer is simple. Itâs because somedayâin about forty-nine thousand and nine hundred years, to be more preciseâthis little asteroid and the crater it has left behind will become the most important of their kind in the history of science.
Theyâre going to change everything.
The crater is still there today. Officially itâs called Meteor Craterâwhich, as weâll see, is a gross misnomer on several levelsâand finding it is easy. Just head east or west on Interstate 40.
Westbound on I-40 from the New MexicoâArizona border, the freeway traces the path of the old and fabled Route 66, the famous âMother Roadâ that was an important part of American culture until it was strangled and mostly buried by the Interstate Highway System. The route passes through some of the most rugged and most beautiful country in the American Southwest. There are the magnificent badlands of the Painted Desert, so named by conquistadors under Francisco Coronado for the soaring buttes and mesas layered up in brilliant bands of lavender and vermillion and magenta; the vistas look like sunsets rendered in rock. The highway also transects the Petrified Forest National Park, a Mars-scape where fallen stands of giant pine trees more than two hundred million years old have been literally turned to stoneâsmoky quartz, purple amethyst, yellow citrine. The Petrified Forest is an eerie place, a haunt for ghosts.
There arenât any cities out this way, and the few towns along the route tend to be low-slung and dusty. Farther west on I-40 thereâs the small ranching and railroad community of Holbrook, which not so very long ago had its own brush with bombardment from space. In 1912 a space boulder about the size of an ice chest exploded high in the air east of town, pelting the ground below with thousands upon thousands of pea-sized meteoritesâan event that was known as âthe day it rained rocks.â Or at least it used to be known that way. When I ask the waitress at a coffee shop about the meteorite fall, sheâs never heard of it. Oh? And has she lived here long? All my life, she saysâwhich is another thing about assaults from space. We tend to forget them pretty quickly.
Still farther westward thereâs Winslow, a once-bustling Route 66 town now fallen on leaner times. If the name is familiar itâs probably because of the line from the 1972 Eagles hit song, âTake It Easyâ: Well Iâm a standinâ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. . . . Thatâs just about the only thing Winslow is famous for. In fact, after the interstate bypassed the city center in the late 1970s, the Winslow town fathers tried to revive their downtownâs flagging fortunes by building the Standinâ on the Corner municipal park, complete with a flatbed Ford and a bronze statue of the late Eagles lead singer Glenn Frey. The effort has been a modest success. Every year tens of thousands of travelers, most of them graying Boomers, stop by to take selfies with the statue and browse in the nearby gift shop, where the sound system plays Eaglesâ songsâand nothing but Eaglesâ songsâall day long. âYou get to where you donât even hear it anymore,â a weary clerk tells me.
North of town I-40 continues west, straight as a rifle shot, through a vast expanse of high desert (elevation about 5,500 feet). This is not the woodland-savannah of fifty thousand years ago; sadly, there are no grazing mammoths or herds of galloping giant bison. A few stunted junipers struggle to survive in the washes, but other than that a guy could go blind looking for a tree. Broiling in the summer, frigid in winter, 20- and 30-mile-an-hour winds are a constant, and gusts of more than 100 miles per hour have been recorded. On the highway, 80,000-pound big rigs shimmy and sway in the crosswind; passing them can be an experience. Except for the highway and the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe train tracks and the occasional billboard touting tourist attractions that lie aheadââJewelry Made By Indians!â âMoccasins For the Whole Family!ââthere is simply nothing here. Itâs the exact geographic center of the lonesome heart of nowhere. People who enjoy desolate places might find a stark minimalist beauty in it. Those who donât might just want to step on the gas.
Eastbound, the trip to Meteor Crater is a little more scenic, at least at first. First thereâs Flagstaff, an attractive mountain town of some seventy thousand souls that bills itself as the gateway to the Grand Canyon eighty miles north. Flagstaff is home to Northern Arizona University and the century-plus-old Lowell Observatory, a piney, campus-like facility that was the nerve center for countless space discoveriesâincluding the discovery of thousands of fresh new asteroids, some of which could someday come our way. Iâll get back to Lowell Observatory later.
East on I-40 there are mountains covered with stately Ponderosa pines, then rolling hills with copses of piñon pine. Twenty miles out from Flagstaff thereâs Winona, another old Route 66 small town best known for its brief mention in a popular songâin this case, the 1946 Nat King Cole hit, â(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.â Flagstaff, Arizona / Donât forget Winona, the song says, and when I repeat the lyric to the old-timer behind the counter at the gas station/convenience store he smiles and gives me a free âDonât Forget Winonaâ postcard. Farther along eastbound, back in the high desert now, on the right are the crumbled remains of a famous 1940s Route 66 tourist trap called the Twin Arrows Trading Postâthe âarrowsâ being two telephone poles stuck at an angle in the ground with plywood sheets for fletchings. The arrows are still there, but the trading post name has since been appropriated by the nearby Twin Arrows Native American casino, where the Navajo Nation exacts its long overdue revenge. Although itâs not visible from the highway, still farther on are the equally dissolute remains of an Old West ghost town called Canyon Diablo, which will play a role later in our story.
But whichever route taken, westbound or eastbound, eventually there is Exit 233. I steer my pickup onto the exit ramp, past the Meteor Mobil station and the Meteor RV Park, and then head south on a two-lane stretch of good blacktop. As signs along the road announce, Iâm crossing part of the famous Bar T Bar Ranch, a family-owned spread of 300,000 acres of private and leased land that prides itself on raising range-fed, antibiotic- and growth-hormone-free Angus cattle. (If youâd like to eat one, you can do so at the upscale Diablo Burger restaurants in Flagstaff and Tucson.) The ground around here is still littered with small fragments of meteorite material left by our asteroid of fifty...