Barringer medal acceptance address - 1997 July 23, Maui, Hawaii

Abstract

Officers and Members of the Meteoritical Society, Professor Pepin, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor to receive the Barringer Award. My first trip to a meteor crater was to Meteor Crater, or, as it has been historically called, Barringer Crater. Since the crater was surrounded to a radius of more than 10 km by fragments of the iron-nickel meteorite, Canyon Diablo, I never could understand why some geologists insisted that it was volcanic! What volcano emits iron-nickel? The 1 km in diameter Barringer Crater, Arizona is, of course, named after the mining engineer Daniel Barringer and his heirs who run the crater as a high-quality science exhibit. They are a scientifically appreciative family-run company who both support meteorite research, sponsor a wonderful interpretive program at the Meteor Crater Museum as well as support this meeting and this award. Their interest and support is appreciated by their community. My first trip to Barringer Crater was led by Eugene Shoemaker in 1972. Gene mapped the crater in 1960 for his Ph.D. thesis, figured out how planetary cratering worked, and went on to explain it to the rest of the world as he participated in exploring the Moon and then virtually all the solid planets and satellites in the solar system. Although I was an associate professor when Gene Shoemaker and Don Anderson brought me to Caltech, I learned much from Shoemaker and was devastated last Friday when I learned of his accidental death during his annual trek to Australia to map preserved craters on this desert continent.

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