Illustrative image created for Word ’Round Town; not an actual photograph of the marker.
DECORAH, IOWA ~ If you’ve ever walked around Decorah and thought there was something special beneath your feet…
Well.
You weren’t wrong.
You may have just underestimated it by about 465 million years.
A new bronze marker has been installed at Barbara Barnhart Van Peenen Memorial Park marking the scientific “point of impact” of an ancient meteor that struck what is now Decorah during the Ordovician Period.
And when we say ancient, we’re not talking old barn ancient.
We’re talking before dinosaurs, before trees and even before fish as we know them ancient. At the time, the area that would eventually become Northeast Iowa was covered by a shallow sea.
The impact created a crater approximately 3.5 miles across.
But don’t go looking for a giant hole in the middle of town.
Over millions of years, the crater filled with sediment and was buried. The familiar hills and valley around Decorah today came much later, carved primarily by the Upper Iowa River. The ancient impact structure remains buried beneath the landscape.
And Then Things Get Even Stranger…
The crater helped preserve an extraordinary fossil record.
Among its most famous residents was Pentecopterus decorahensis ~ an enormous prehistoric creature commonly called a sea scorpion.
It lived in the water, had paddle~like rear legs and was an apex predator of its time.
So yes.
Long before anybody worried about mosquitoes in Iowa…
Decorah had giant sea scorpions.
We’ll take the mosquitoes.
Now You Can Stand Over the Impact Point
The new bronze medallion at Van Peenen Park gives visitors an actual destination connected to this otherwise invisible piece of geological history.
From the park’s main entrance off Quarry Hill Road, visitors can take the Higinn Trail loop, approximately 1.7 miles total, to reach the marker. The route is off~road and includes some elevation changes, so visitors are advised to dress for trail and weather conditions and avoid muddy periods.
And here’s one more mind-bender:
At the marker’s location, the actual crater lies roughly 300 feet beneath you.
So the next time someone tells you nothing exciting ever happens around here, you have an answer:
Give us a break. We had a meteor hit Decorah.
We’re still recovering. ❤️
Deliverance Hope ~ word-round-town.com
Keep Goin’ ‘Round Town
There’s always another story waiting just around the corner.