[QUOTE][b]Odd how they didn't find the meteor to verify their calculations and all, though I would agree it probley would have drilled through alot of sedement, probably more than they would expect if the area of impact was not solidified.[/QUOTE]
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Barringer's investors called in Moulton, an astrophysicist, to explain why there wasn't an asteroid buried there in the desert. His two conclusions were that the original impactor was 3% of the mass Barringer thought it was, and that most of that was vaporized on impact. It was small and fast, not big and slow. Barringer died of a heart attack within weeks. In a way, H.H. Nininger "found" the meteorite by dragging magnets across the surrounding desert, thousands of tiny-grains of nickel-iron, grains that recondensed from the cloud of metal vapor left after the impact and were laying around in the sand for Barringer's truckloads of equipment to drive right over without notice.
[QUOTE][b]if you find any information on core samples, i'd like to see the results.[/QUOTE]
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Ok, but it'll be from the 'net, and information there usually does lack detail.
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--My other plausable theory on this would be, that at the point of impact by the celectial object, whether comet, meteorite, or some other body that hit the earth. It would be that by the effects of a possible factor in the initial impact, would have been greatly effective in the calculation in the velocity or size of the impacting body. The factors quantifying the characteristics of the crater we observe today could be from different causes, for instance, viscosity of the compound impacted, the material that was impacted, its fluid saturation, amount of solidification and depth by which it is solidified.
--A conclusion at this point in this theory is that factors in the initial impact would have been much more 'leanient' if such a word would be used. That is, the impacted material, in theory would have been a time during the flood or shortly after in where non-solidified/lithified sediments were impacted and this Water saturated sediment was thrown into the air. Continuing to remain saturated by the effects of emense clouds of vapor covering a high portion of the earth, and simply returned to earth within a still large radius from impact.
--After impact a crater could have possibly, if impacted while flooding was still occuring or in an area where flood waters had not receeded, some erosion would have taken place, possibly widening the crater.
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My opinion here is different. First, we know that there was a rocky foundation for the impact to occur over because that's what shattercones are: rocks that were crushed by impact forces. Plus you have the crushed sandstones found in Barringer which are stratigraphically correlated with "solid" sandstones elsewhere in the general area.
I'm not sure how wet sediments would respond to an impact load compared to dry sediments. But we all know how water is when you slap it with the palm of your hand, it seems hard. I don't know this for sure but I'm confident that a rock traveling at 40,000 MPH is going to respond to water or mud the same way it would a layer of rock.
Finally, I think that erosion will tend to fill up a crater more than widening it--at which point widening ceases. You should notice though that Chessie seems to have been eroded slightly in the way you mention, with the walls slumping into the crater. (first URL, the factsheet from the USGS) That's why it doesn't have the usually tilted rims we expect to find in a crater. But the telltale shocked minerals are still found.
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