ArtBlogHouston: Meteor Craters of West Texas

Railyard Studio, Houston Texas

Houston, Texas, May 2011: I decided to stop painting meteors and go out looking for the scars they've left on the earth. I took some time off around Memorial Day weekend to traverse the great state of Texas with my father. We'd been planning and talking about exploring the meteor craters in West Texas. We were hoping to find meteorites in the dry deserts of the southwest.

I drove across Texas on Interstate-10 to visit the two meteor impact craters near Odessa and Fort Stockton. On the way from Houston to El Paso to pick up my father, I stopped in Fort Stockton to head 15 miles south of I-10 to the very large meteor crater known as Sierra Madera. The highway goes right through the crater a few miles west of the center, which is marked by uplifted peaks 242 meters above the surrounding basin.

U.S. Route 385, 17-miles south of Fort Stockton, Texas: The Sierra Madera Crater Basin with uplift peaks in the distance.

The crater is so large that it is not immediately apparent. I studied satellite photos of the crater and measured distances between Fort Stockton and the outer edge of a crater roughly 13 km in diameter. Driving along the highway, I stopped just over the rim of the crater, with the basin gently sloping down toward the peaks in the center.

Uplifted central peaks of Meteor Crater Sierra Madera.

The uplifted peak and rim of the crater are said to have been much higher shortly after the impact, which eventually slid down filling much of the basin. Some geologist have suggested the crater is approximately 100 million years old, putting it in the Cretaceous or older.

Cretaceous geography of North America, image from US Geological Society, pubic domain.

This part of West Texas was a shallow Cretaceous sea at the time a 1.3-kilometer wide meteor struck the Earth from the the east at an angle of 70 degree. Cretaceous mollusk fossils (simple shells) can be found a couple miles outside the crater. This impact happened roughly 45 million years into the age of dinosaurs. Another 35 million years after the Sierra Madera impact, the 10-km wide Chicxulub Meteor struck the Yucatan ending the age of the dinosaurs and ushering in the age of mammals. These last few years I've been working on a time line of the history of Earth, stretching back four and a half billion years.