[meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos

[Michael L Blood]

Perhaps I am dumber than a bag of hammers, but
I am confused.... Are Carnacas and Titicaca two separate falls
Or one in the same? Is anyone else confused on this issue?
        Michael

on 10/2/07 5:59 PM, Michael Farmer at meteoriteguy at yahoo.com wrote:


> Chris, it is a hell of a crater, at least 13 meters in

> diameter, more than one meter of uplift, looks

> identical to Meteor Crater to me, on a much smaller

> scale. 

> There in fact does seem to be shocked material at the

> crater, I found only inside and just outside the

> crater, large pieces of compacted sandstone, yet there

> is no sandstone there, it seems to have solidified on

> the impact, everything else is more like soft mud.

> Large, and I mean larger pieces of sod, weighing at

> least 40 or 50 kilograms were thrown more than 50-100

> meters, and smaller dirt clod debris thrown up to 15o

> meters in all directions. This is a serious impact, I

> mean you can call it what you want, but with the

> uplift, the incredible debris field thrown to all

> sides, the huge size, and volume of the crater itself,

> certainly leads me to believe that the mass weighed

> many tons and is obviously in the hole under some

> meters of fallback debris. The locals report mushroom

> cloud lingered for more than a hour.

> As far as more pieces, this meterite came in over lake

> Titikaka, and if you have never seen this lake, it is

> HUGE! I would guess that as fragil as the meteorite

> is, that tons of debris fell off but would most likely

> have all fallen into the lake, or perhaps some on the

> mountains just inside of Bolivia. It is not populated

> there, and I assume from talking to most witnesses,

> that the large main mass, which was a massive ball of

> fire much larger and brighter than the Sun, caught

> everyones attention pretty well, and would be so

> bright that smaller pieces would be drowned out by the

> intensity of the main mass. That is what I think

> happened, surely many more pieces broke off but from

> where the main mass hit, back down the flightpath is

> nothing but swamps and high mountains for about 10

> miles, then 15 miles of lake. Perfect for most

> material to be lost.

> Michael Farmer

> --- Chris Peterson <clp at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:

> 

>> What remains to be determined is if this is actually

>> a crater, or just a

>> big splash. In the first case, some shocked material

>> should show up, and

>> I think it's likely that nothing is left in the

>> bottom. If there really

>> is a big meteorite at the bottom, then this probably

>> isn't a crater in

>> the usual sense (that is, produced by a large energy

>> release as the 

>> parent body explodes/vaporizes).

>> 

>> I don't believe I've seen anything credible to

>> suggest that the water

>> was actually boiling or steaming. It doesn't take

>> much energy to make a

>> hole this size in soft ground- probably around 100

>> kg TNT equivalent.

>> And that's not enough to heat up that much water

>> very much. So I expect

>> that any apparent bubbling was nothing more than an

>> effect of ground

>> water filling in the new hole.

>> 

>> If the recovered material is shocked fragments, it

>> may be structurally

>> quite different from the parent body.

>> 

>> Chris

>> 

>> *****************************************

>> Chris L Peterson

>> Cloudbait Observatory

>> http://www.cloudbait.com

>> 

>> 

>> ----- Original Message -----

>> From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>

>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>

>> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 5:37 PM

>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail

>> photos

>> 

>> 

>>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 15:54:57 -0700 (PDT), you

>> wrote:

>>> 

>>>> Is it indeed possible that a mass of say 3-7 tons

>>>> could cause such intense heat on impact? We think

>> that

>>>> the compression of the soil, in an instant to many

>>>> meteors deep could also cause intense heating.

>>>> Every person we interviewed decribed boiling

>> water,

>>>> lots of steam, and horrible sulfer type smell. The

>>> 

>>> What I wonder is if maybe the pressure/heat could

>> have caused 

>>> dissolved gases to

>>> bubble out from the water?  So it might not have

>> been at a boiling

>>> temperature,

>>> but still bubbling/steaming?  Too bad we don't

>> have samples of the

>>> groundwater

>>> and soil from the area to see if there is anything

>> weird/extensively

>>> poluted

>>> about it.

>>> 

>>> Also odd, of course, is a fraglie, porus stone as

>> you describe 

>>> surviving to the

>>> ground big enough and fast enough to make the

>> crater.

>> 

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> 

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