It must have been a really BIG bang…

When I fly commercially, I always try to get a window seat so I can look out of the plane at the landscape and wonder about things I see on the ground. I even pick a specific side of the plane I’m on if I know there’s something special along the route that I can study from the aircraft 40,000 feet in the air.

I know that’s a weird concept for most people who like to sit on the aisle so they don’t feel as confined, can take an easy mid-flight bathroom break and can make a quicker exit from the plane when they get to their destination gate. And of course, no one wants to sit in the middle seat unless there are no other options except perhaps to cram yourself in the overhead luggage bin.

If you’re on a flight out of El Paso to Phoenix or the Los Angeles area and suffer the annoyance of sitting in a window seat, you might spot something interesting on the ground about 30 miles west of the city near the Potrillo Mountains. It’s a shallow crater more than a mile wide and about 430 feet deep, lined with volcanic rock and an occasional small lake in its center.

Kilbourne Hole, located in the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument on Bureau of Land Management land in the in far southern New Mexico is what is known geologically as a “maar volcanic crater.”

Sources on the internet describe explain that these craters are formed when rising volcanic magma encounters a saturated underground water table above it. The intense heat of the magma brings the water to above boiling and eventually the magma/water mix explodes toward the surface in spectacular style. It’s kind of like having a pressure cooker (remember those?) suddenly blow off its lid when the pressure inside the kettle gets too strong for the seals to hold. It would have been a pretty loud and dramatic explosion if anyone had been around to hear it.

Kilbourne Hole and its little brother Hunt’s Hole are located in the Potrillo Lava Fields of southern Dona Ana County, part of the Rio Grande rift which runs roughly along the path of the Rio Grande through all of New Mexico. There are numerous volcanic features along this rift though its north-south route, including Albuquerque’s West Mesa volcanoes, the Jemez Mountains and many lava outcroppings along the way.

According to Wikipedia, the Rio Grande Rift is an area where the earth’s crust is being constantly stretched and thinned. This stretching and thinning allows magma from deep within the earth’s core to push toward the surface. Additionally, Kilbourne Hole and Hunt’s Hole are located on the Fitzgerald-Robledo fault system, making magma’s path to the surface even easier.

Geologically speaking the two maars are not that old — between 24,000 and 80,000 years when they exploded. It’s like it was in the last millisecond in a year-long calendar of our planet’s history.

Kilbourne Hole is noted for the large amount of xenoliths that were blasted out during the explosion. Xenoliths are lower mantle and upper crustal rocks that form lherzolite, a greenish tinted rock with black flecks.

Getting there is kind of an adventure over somewhat primitive roads, from what I can find online. Here’s a Bureau of Land Management link with a route that you can take there from New Mexico 28 in southern Dona Ana County:

Kilbourne Hole Volcanic Crater | Bureau of Land Management

And reverting back to a my post last week before Halloween, I wonder if La Llorona occasionally haunts the shallow pool of water that occasionally forms in the bottom of the crater. That would be pretty spooky to witness on a dark night in the middle of the desert wilderness, I think.