CHAPTER 51

STAR WOUND IN WETUMPKA

Structurally disturbed.” For decades, that’s how the Alabama Geological Survey described the jagged landscape of Wetumpka. It wasn’t until 1972 that geologist Tony Neathery realized that Wetumpka sits “right on the bull’s eye of the greatest natural disaster in Alabama’s history.” According to the Wetumpka Impact Crater Commission, the hills just east of downtown are the remains of a meteor crater measuring five miles wide. The blast happened when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, about eighty-five million years ago, and would have destroyed all life for a radius of about forty miles.

Wetumpka Impact Crater historical marker, 2013. Photo by Beverly Crider.

The team surveying the area published its findings in 1976, calling the feature an astrobleme, which literally means a “star wound.” The findings were met with skepticism, as geologists generally did not believe that large meteors could hit the Earth. In 1998, a research team headed by Auburn University geology professor David T. King Jr. found that the crater core contained shocked quartz, which can only be formed by an enormous explosion such as that caused by a meteor impact.

In 2002, the site became an internationally recognized impact crater. Scientists believe that at the time of the impact, the area was covered by a shallow sea up to one hundred feet in depth. Wetumpka is now regarded as the best-preserved marine impact crater in the world. Energy released by the impact was about 175,000 times greater than the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima in 1945.