Word: crater
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Great Spirit. One Indian finding was negative, and damaging to a colorful legend-that the meteor crater near Canyon Diablo in Arizona was feared and shunned superstitiously by the Indians. Legend has it that the crater was regarded as the place where the Great Spirit appeared as a huge ball of fire and plunged into the earth. This story, according to Professor Lincoln La Paz, meteor expert of the University of New Mexico, even penetrated scientific writings and was used as "proof" that the meteor fell at a date when the region had human inhabitants to witness its fall...
...Professor La Paz spoiled the whole yarn by announcing that he had found, close to the lip of the crater, a pit house of prehistoric, 1000 A.D. Indians who obviously did not fear the place too much to live there. He suspects that the legend was invented recently by white men. Geological evidence indicates that the meteor probably fell more than 50,000 years ago, when it is unlikely that humans were around to be frightened...
...bomb exploded at ground level would expend much of its energy in digging a crater. Thus the destruction, although more devastating around the detonation point, would be limited to a smaller area than in the case of an air burst. A bomb exploded under water would also lose some of its blast effect, but would throw up an immense column of radioactive water, to contaminate everything on which it fell...
...fire (900 feet across) would be fused or vaporized. Outward from the center would be circles of death and damage exactly like those of an air burst, but smaller. Radioactive dust, from pulverized buildings, would be an added menace for those in the path of the wind. The central crater (as at Alamogordo) would be a no man's land for months, perhaps indefinitely, because of lingering radioactivity in fused steel and stone...
...Meen estimated that the meteorite must have fallen at least 3,000 years ago, since there are no Indian or Eskimo legends about it. He named it Chubb Crater after the sharp-eyed prospector, and promised that a full-dress expedition would report on it within a year...