Meteor Crater still yields space secrets after 50,000 years

Arizona’s Meteor Crater, formed about 50,000 years ago, remains the best-preserved Earth impact site and a living laboratory for studying impact processes. Ongoing fieldwork, lab analyses, and computer studies—supported by Barringer Family Fund grants—continue to produce new data, with researchers like Dan Durda saying the crater provides new insights every year and climate and geological processes can obscure other craters elsewhere.