The 50,000-year-old crater that prepared NASA for the moon

0:02WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Full astronaut gear doing the same thing that we're doing and on a little bit rougher of a trail. Before NASA sent Apollo astronauts to the moon, they trained at the bottom of a 50 ,000-year-old crater in northern Arizona. Now for the first time ever, you can visit Meteor Crater as well.

0:34It's Friday, July 24th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, we're taking a road trip. We'll visit the famous Detroit industry murals painted by Diego Rivera almost a century ago and reflect on how they still inspire awe today. This was intended to provoke a strong response, and it did. And I am thankful every time I walk through this courtyard that the museum chose to stand behind the artist project and vision and did not succumb to those calls to destroy the artwork. Also, if you're going to take a road trip, you're going to need some audiobooks.

1:16We've got some recommendations coming up in about 15 minutes. But first, Peter O'Dowd takes us on a journey through the depths of time and into the mystery of space, all without leaving northern Arizona. Here's Peter. Ages ago, before humans lived in North America, a space rock pierced the atmosphere and screamed in a blaze of light toward the surface of the Earth. Oh, the catastrophe it must have been when the meteor hit the ground near modern-day Winslow, Arizona. The hole it left behind was a mile wide, and 50 ,000 years later, I walked right into it. We believe there was a 150-foot diameter meteorite that came in at about 26 ,000 miles per hour.

2:07That's big and fast. Yes, huge, massive, and very fast. Tyler Johnson is my guide into one of the best preserved impact craters on the planet. For years, visitors have wanted access to the bottom. And now, for the first time ever, it's open to the public. So one morning in June, three tourists and I headed down the narrow trail one step at a time. So this is the start of the trail. From here, it is going to be like we're off-roading. So just be very careful of your step and we'll have a good time. This part of northern Arizona is windswept and mostly barren. But 50 ,000 years ago, it looked very different.

2:45Mammoths and giant ground sloths roamed the juniper pinion forest. The trail is steep. Loose rocks slip underfoot. Decades ago, NASA astronauts traveled this same path. They came here during the Apollo mission to prepare for their trip to the moon. And that's what they did in the 60s and 70s. Full astronaut gear doing the same thing that we're doing and on a little bit rougher of a trail. Further down the trail we go past a tangle of old pipes that once carried water to miners on the crater floor. I noticed that fellow hiker Gina Stoll is taking her time. How's it going for you? It's going fine.

3:25It's good. I'll be a lot better on the way up. What's your impression so far? It's quite magnificent, really. What about you? Oh, I think it's pretty unique. Yeah, yeah. In the distance, something catches our eye. It's the tale of an old airplane. In the 1960s, a Cessna lost power over the crater and crashed. We're getting there, getting close. The 30-minute hike, 570 feet down, passes through planetary history in the blink of an eye. At the bottom, the crater walls embrace you. The only view of the sky is straight up. It's hot. It's time to rest. Johnson sits in a sliver of shade, and I ask more questions about this special place.

4:07Well, let's start with the rock that made this big hole in the ground. What do we know about it? So what we know, or what we believe we know, I should say, it is primarily made up of metal, so 92 % iron, 7 % nickel, 0.5 % cobalt, making it incredibly heavy. So incredibly fast and incredibly massive. Can you even imagine how big the explosion would have been? Oh, it would cause shock all the way up to 100 miles away. And so the explosion was incredible. It was like an atomic or a nuclear bomb. And this is 50 ,000 years ago. So at that point, there weren't even human beings living in this part of the globe.

4:48But I mean, if you were an animal or a tree, you were gone. You had a rough day. Yeah, you had a very bad day. So does it rival like anything that would have, say, killed the dinosaurs, that impact? It is a baby in comparison to the one that happened millions of years ago to the dinosaurs. To put it in perspective, we believe that the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs was anywhere between six and nine miles in diameter. So miles in diameter versus 150 feet in diameter. Oh my gosh, okay. So this one is nothing in comparison to what wiped out the dinosaurs. Well, and you know what I'm noticing is that it is in such perfect condition.

5:36Why is it so well preserved? So it has two main reasons. First off, it is a young meteor crater. When we talk about the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, that happened millions of years ago. We're talking thousands of years ago. Plus, it is in the middle of a desert. And so being that we don't get a lot of rain, it helps preserve it. if we were to be, let's say, in Florida. It would already be filled in, it would be very swamp-like, and it wouldn't have been able to keep up with the preservation. Okay, so that was 50 ,000 years ago, as we've said. Then humans come. I'm banging on this big, rusty tank behind us.

6:16What's the story of all this equipment down here at the bottom of the crater? So in the early 1900s, we had two men, one by the name of Holsinger and one by the name of Beringer, and they found a big meteorite out here. That led to a great obsession, is what I like to call it, of trying to find the meteorite that made the impact. They believed that it had to be buried underneath the ground. So to your point, we're standing in front of this big old piece of equipment because they were mining out here for nearly 30 years trying to find the meteorite that caused the impact that we're seeing today.

6:57They wanted the iron. Yes, they wanted the iron. They wanted to get rich and they wanted to find it so they could, you know, enjoy their lives and retire early. What is this tank right here? This is a steam powered tank that was used for the winch that is besides us. And it was used to lower in heavy machinery and objects, people included, in and out of the mineshaft just over nearby us. So there's mineshafts all around? All over the place. There were at least 28 different mineshafts that were drilled. and these were in the bottom of the crater, horizontally, into the rim of the crater, all over the place.

7:35Wow, but they didn't find anything, I guess, sadly for them. Most of the meteor was vaporized. Yeah, so we talked about how heavy and how fast it was coming in. And so when it hit, it hit like an atomic bomb and over 80 % would either be vaporized or recondensed into different materials, which is why the water and the ground has such a high iron content level. So one of the things I'm really interested about, and I didn't know any of this before coming here, that the Apollo mission, NASA, came to the bottom of this crater to train its astronauts. So Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, they were here.

8:11Correct. What were they doing? So in the late 60s, early 70s, they used this as a training spot for the astronauts because it was the most realistic to a crater on the moon. So they would make them come out here and physically train They would make them wear their head-to-toe astronaut gear and walk around the crater to test and make sure that the equipment and tools Were actually viable and able to be used On the moon when they did the landing. Did they learn anything doing that? They did they actually had A lot of lessons that they learned one of which they actually tore their space suit and they had to go back to the drawing board because if that happened on the moon, we would have wound up with a dead astronaut.

8:56Oh. So very, very good things they found here and lessons they learned before sending someone into space and learning them the hard way. And does NASA still come here from time to time? They do. A lot less frequently, but they do still come out here and they use it to train. Notably, one of the last times they came out, they brought a nice rover and they test drove the rover to see if it was going to be able to do its thing when it got sent to where it was going. Oh my gosh. We started obviously at the top. In fact, look, I can see some people. They might be staring down at us at the top of the crater.

9:31There's the visitor center up there. But it's such a different vantage point here at the floor. What do you feel when you're down here? I feel like I'm connected with the Earth in such a special way. connected with space, even though you're not in space, because it's something from space that created this. And it's such a remarkable feeling. Getting to look up and see walls all surrounding you is such a beautiful, I mean, remarkable experience. So that was our tour guide, Tyler Johnson. And it turns out the other hikers feel that sense of reverence too. Amateur astronomer Jonathan Masurda takes one final look at the towering crater walls before we leave.

10:13Yeah, when you look through a telescope at the moon, and I would suggest you do that, if you get a chance, you'll see craters just like this one that, you know, you can now kind of go down to the bottom of one and picture yourself and be as close as I get to anything like that. It's a great experience. It's very awning. Okay, so now we have to go up. Yeah, now the fun begins. Are we ready? We're ready. Let's do it. All right. Okay.

10:42In a way, going back up is like going back to the future. And so we crane our heads toward the rim of the crater and start trudging up the trail. The sun came out.

10:57Just as we're climbing out of this bad boy. We make progress, one step and one deep breath at a time.

11:08For here and now, I'm Peter O'Dowd at the Meteor Crater in northern Arizona.

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11:56Are you stuck in a job you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place? Are your reasons for staying really just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner and get 50 % off your first coaching session at strawberry.me slash NPR. Scott Tong and producer Julia Corcoran recently took a road trip of their own to Michigan. They talked to people about the elections happening there, and you can hear a lot more about that in another episode of this podcast. It's on July 27th. While they were there, they also stopped by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

12:39In some museums, to find the most famous work of art, you have to wend your way through long corridors or denture to the end of a wing, which is part of the fun of visiting a museum, not criticizing. But at DIA, the must-see works are monumental pieces surrounding the museum's vast interior courtyard. Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted his Detroit industry murals during the Great Depression. He was commissioned by Henry Ford's son Edsel, president of the Ford Auto Company at the time. Rivera painted the natural realm intertwined with the industrial world, placing factory workers front and center as heroic figures.

13:21Curator Benjamin Coleman pointed out to Scott Tong the two largest panels in the mural depict the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit. This was the largest industrial complex in the world at that point in history when Rivera came to the city, and so he condensed, abstracted, and depicted the manufacturing process into two monumental panels. If you look in the center of the North Wall, there's a great orange glow that represents the foundry at the Rouge plant. So metals arrive into the plant, are melted down, and we see this origin of the parts that find their way into the cars. The furnace, as it were, where the beginning is, yeah.

14:09Absolutely, yeah. And then the artist intended the composition to snake up and down and around the walls in a serpentine pattern. So we don't look just from left to right. You have to follow the flowing organic lines of the factory to trace the assembly from start to finish. If your eye drifts down to the assembly line, the scene is dominated by these larger-than-life workers who are engaged in a very choreographed and collaborative process of putting together the engine block for the 1932 Ford. There are workers of different colors. That's on purpose, yeah. That is a deliberate choice that the artist made that did not represent the factory floor as he would have seen it in the 1930s.

15:00Rivera arrived in Detroit in the spring of 1932. So we're in the Great Depression here. We're in exactly some of the toughest years of the Great Depression, especially here in the city of Detroit. the workforce that he would have seen was deeply segregated along lines of race and ethnicity and certainly along lines of gender. So we see very few women depicted. He made the decision when he painted these murals to show a racially integrated workforce on the factory floor. What he might have wanted to see? Absolutely. This is a good time to pause and ask you to talk a little bit about Diego Rivera.

15:39He was a Marxist. Why was he chosen to do this? It's a really great question about how Diego Rivera, the communist, and Edsel Ford, heir to one of the great industrial fortunes of the world, came to a shared vision for this artwork and for the story that Rivera chose to tell about the city of Detroit and Detroit's industry. In the early 1930s, Diego Rivera is renowned around the world for his art making. He is part of a small circle of painters who come together in Mexico City, painters of grand-scale public murals, were deeply committed to the populist ideals of the Mexican Revolution. Rivera was coordinating a large team of artists and collaborators to create these murals.

16:31So it was a team that created these murals? absolutely a team project. But Rivera himself did all of the finished painting on the wall. And this was an incredibly grueling process, painting for 12, sometimes 16 hours a day. And that is largely because of the very demanding medium that he chose to use. This is painted in a true fresco style. Which for the rest of us means what? That means that it's painted with a water-based pigment on a wet plaster wall before it dries. It creates an incredibly durable and long-lasting artwork that retains, as we see almost 100 years later, the vibrant color and tones that the artist painted in the 1930s.

17:17When you bring people in, if there is an order to look at things, where do you kind of back up and start? So I'm backing up now and looking at the east wall, which is the very origin of the story as the artist painted it. There is a long horizontal panel that shows an infant. In the womb still, yeah. Exactly, yeah. An infant in a womb but surrounded by the earth. So we see the roots of plants growing around the infant. The artist intended this to represent the origins of life in agriculture. So we see life emerging from the earth, spinning around to the south wall. we see the second half of the manufacturing process for the 1932 Ford.

18:01And there's a detail that I always point out here that is as much about what you don't see as what you do see. If you really crane your eye to the very center, it seems almost like an afterthought. There's a very small red car. It's just dwarfed by everything else. It's, you know, Waldo in there. So small. Exactly. And it's a very telling detail about Rivera and what he wanted to depict in these murals. Around the world, when people thought about the Ford River Rouge factory, what was most often depicted are great gleaming rows of cars fresh off Henry Ford's moving assembly line. Sure, that's the picture.

18:39Exactly, that's the picture. And Rivera, in composing these murals, turned that almost entirely on its head. The finished car is almost an afterthought. And instead, he's painting at grand scale, at heroic scale, the everyday Detroiters, the work that they did. Well, let's pause there. So we're looking at the West Wall. This is a much smaller scale fresco. And what does the image of Henry Ford look like? There is an engineer who is based roughly on the figure of Henry Ford, but with composite features that Rivera took from images of Thomas Edison. who was Henry Ford's great idol. This composite figure that's sitting at a desk in the foreground is almost a small detail in the panel that otherwise is dedicated to this great swooping arc of pipes, conduits, and machinery.

19:35But people often look at this and observe that that great swooping pipe doesn't look very much like a steam pipe in a hydroelectric plant, but it almost has an anatomical resemblance to it. It looks maybe like an ear. Oh, it does look like an ear. There are many, many different theories, but it seems to suggest that Henry Ford is listening. The manager, the boss is listening. Eavesdropping, whatever. There it is, yeah. There is so much to see. I always like to point out one of the most provocative panels that depicts medical research. There are several adults. It looks like scientists in the background.

20:13And in the foreground, what almost looks like Jesus in a manger, there's a cow and a horse. And there's a baby getting a shot, a vaccine. So you are exactly right. This is a scene of medical research and vaccination that is in many ways built around the iconography of depicting the infant Christ and Holy Family in the manger. in Renaissance paintings. So we see a modern infant in the center who's being held up by a doctor and nurse and being given the smallpox vaccine. He is saying in a very direct way that he considers the modern scientific discoveries that create vaccines to be on par with a biblical miracle.

21:01This was intended to provoke a strong response, and it did when the murals made their debut in Detroit in 1933. There was some suggestion that these amounted to sacrilege, and I am thankful every time I walk through this courtyard that the museum chose to stand behind the artist project and vision and did not succumb to those calls to destroy the artwork. So I'm trying to kind of hear a little bit of what you and Diego Rivera are saying here. Diego Rivera may be asking us to think less about the bosses and the billionaires, but to think about the humans. And he's asking us to look at technology from that perspective.

21:47Fair to say? I would almost reframe the question a bit. I don't know that he's asking us to look at technology. Those details almost become secondary or background details. Instead, these timeless stories of the people themselves, the workers themselves on the factory floor, that is the story that the artist wants to tell.

22:14Benjamin Coleman, curator of American art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Check out pictures at hereandnow.org. Or better yet, take a trip to Detroit. Coming up, I'm back on an audiobook kick, and I've been thinking about what makes a good audiobook. Because it depends a little on how you listen to them. If you're a big multitasker, for example, maybe don't speed it up too much. But you can get a lot out of listening to just about any type of book, I think. And whatever gets you reading is great, in my opinion. After the break, Scott gets some recommendations for audiobooks to take along on your summer road trip.

22:55Stick around.

23:05Are you looking for a good book for a summer listen? We're going to talk now about audiobooks with our friend of the show, Tracy Thomas of the Stacks. It's a website. It's a podcast. Tracy, good to have you. Thanks for having me. Before we get to your list, I just had this observation. One audio book I'm listening to now about the British Isles is narrated by a non-American, which makes sense. For me, it's a bit of a challenging listen. So curious what your thoughts are. So I have read some books on audio by non-American narrators. What's coming to mind is Patrick Radden Keefe's book, Say Nothing, was narrated by a man with a Northern Irish accent.

23:46And I thought it was fantastic. It added to the drama. It added to everything. However, sometimes I think that it can be challenging for American audiences if they're not used to the particular accent. But I sort of like it. Yeah, yeah. All right. You have come, as always, with suggestions, including one we're going to talk about, a memoir from Brandy, the singer, the actor. The audiobook is Phases, and here's a clip of Brandy narrating her book. Ever since I was a little girl, I have been drawn to the moon and the folklore around her. The quiet of the night helps calm my racing thoughts, and the moon soothes me, down to my soul.

24:28I find so much beauty in her phases, an endless cycle of endings and beginnings. Well, there you go. The book is called Phases. Tracy, you in the past have suggested some celebrity memoirs. What do you like about this one? Well, like everyone just heard, her voice is amazing. I love Brandy's raspy voice. So smooth, yeah. Yeah, it's just so good. It's so unique. It's so special. And it is really pleasing to the ear. I also appreciate that this book does two of the things that I think are pretty much must be done to make a great celebrity memoir. One is that she's vulnerable. She's sharing sort of this raw side of herself that people maybe don't know or haven't seen.

25:11And also she's giving us gossip. She's telling us stories. Maybe it's behind the scenes on how a certain song got made. She talks about some of her relationships with people like Whitney Houston. And it's really great if you like her music and maybe don't know her story or if you love Brandy and have been a fan forever and want to know even more about what was going on behind the scenes. You also suggest a couple of true crime books on your list. We've mentioned Patrick Radden Keefe. He narrates London Falling, Newly Out. I thought it was a great listen. You have several audiobook novels on your list that we'll have on our website.