Odessa Meteor Crater

A rancher found the crater first without knowing what it was. In 1892 Julius D. Henderson came on the depression while hunting a lost calf and noted only that it looked different from the land around it. The Handbook describes three craters: the largest covers ten acres, flanked by two smaller ones now filled. The impact lifted Cretaceous limestone forty-five to fifty feet, turned it on end and faulted it. In September 1939 the University of Texas, Ector County and local businesses paid for an excavation, with Work Projects Administration labor. Attempts to make the site a park failed.

What the plaque says

Odessa Meteor Crater East and South (route marked) is located the Odessa Meteor Craters, formed in prehistoric time when a great shower of nickel-iron meteorites collided with the earth. Geologists estimate that the time of the meteor fall was about 20,000 years ago. The shower was composed of many thousands of individual meteorites of various sizes which fell over an area of about 2 square mile. The smaller meteorites, which were by far the most numerous, either came to rest on the earths' surface or at the bottom of shallow impact pits within the soil. there were several very large meteoritic masses in the shower, however, and these struck the earth with such enormous energy that they penetrated deeply into bedrock and shattered with explosive force, thus producing craters in the earth at the places of impact. when freshly formed the craters were funnel-shaped depressions, the largest about 550 feet in diameter and 100 feet in depth. More than 100,000 cubic yards of crushed rock was ejected from this crater by the energy released from the impacting meteoritic mass. Smaller crater in the vicinity of the main crater range from 15 feet 18 feet in depth. In the ages following their formation the craters gradually accumulated sediments deposited by wind and water. The main crater was eventually filled to with 6 feet of the level of the surrounding plain. It now appears as a shallow, nearly circular depression surrounded by a low, rock-buttressed rim. The several smaller associated craters were so completely buried that their existence was not suspected until they were exposed in excavations made by the University of Texas, in the early 1940's. Meteor craters are among the rarest and most interesting of land features. Observations by astrophysicists indicated that meteoritic bodies which strike our earth originate within our Solar System, probably form the steroidal belt located between the planets, Jupiter and Saturn. (1962)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Odessa Meteor Crater — steps away
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• White-Pool House — 8.9 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 20 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Monahans Sandhills State Park — 22 mi
  A small corner of a 200-mile dune field east of the Pecos, where fresh water lies just under the sand and a forest of shin oak grows no higher than your knee.

More markers nearby

• The Caprock — 4.5 mi
• Well's Point — 6.5 mi
• Penwell — 7.8 mi
• Ector High School — 8.2 mi