Architectural Sculptures

I bought an 1872 cast iron corinthian capital which I just found in Chicago. It was part of the C. Holden building which is still extant but being gutted. The capital came from the interior columns and like my small one from Nashville it has the individually riveted-on leaves.

Having always been interested in geology, fossils, as well as space, I also acquired a couple of specimens of the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona which were something I have seen around for sale but hadn’t gotten around to buying. So now I have a couple of chunks, the larger one is 215 gms, about 2″ across, mostly iron and nickel.
Really awe inspiring to imagine that iron-nickel meterite 50,000 years ago coming in at they estimate about 9 miles per second, and about 80 feet across slamming into the desert in Arizona to blast out that 1.2 km crater about 700 feet deep!
The explosion mostly vaporized the meteorite, but quite a lot of fragments of the metal were blown all over as far as about 6 miles away.

According to studies on the melted and shocked each rocks in the crater, the impact force was around 50 GPa, which is to say in more familiar terms, about 7.2 million psi (pounds per square inch) or 1 billion 36 million pounds per square foot!

Of course no one knows where it came from, likely the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and probably once the molten core of a planet that might have been there. In any case, it was circling around and around for eons till it crashed in Arizona 50,000 years ago!

I was surprised to read a family bought the land the crater is on and this is privately owned! I thought it was part of the national park system or something of that sort, but no, it looks like this family bought the land around the 1900 intending to MINE it for what they thought would be a million tons of iron. Now it’s locked up as private property and no searching for meteorites is allowed. It’s become a tourist trap you have to pay $15 or $20 to even go in and look at from the top- they don’t allow anyone down on the crater floor.

I guess it’s a good thing the US Govt didn’t sell the Grand Canyon land or Yellowstone to private people, or these too would be locked up, fenced in private property with tourist trap buildings and pay-to-look deals.