Review of the Barringer crater studies and views on the crater’s origin

The first scientific studies of Barringer crater, Arizona, USA (also known as the Coon Butte crater), began more than a century ago; however, views on the crater’s origin have been contradictory. At the beginning of the 20th century, D.M. Barringer, a mining engineer, became interested in the possibility of finding large useable iron masses in this crater and searched for these masses for more than 25 years, standing up for the idea of the crater’s meteoric origin, contrary to the objections of opponents who tried to indicate that the crater was caused by terrestrial geological processes. Mining, accompanied by different scientific works, made it possible to obtain reliable data on the structure and impact origin of the crater; however, attempts to find meteorite iron deposits in this crater were unsuccessful. Barringer crater was the first object on the Earth where purposeful studies were performed for many decades and made it possible to develop many criteria of the impact origin of circular geological structures and mechanisms of formation of these structures, as well as to compare this crater with similar morphostructures on the surfaces of other planets. These studies have played an important role in the formation and development of the theory of impact cratering, which has been generally acknowledged in present-day science.