[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

[Jerry]

"It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said, 
adding
that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands 
and
land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that 
mound
will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
friction."
Just wht Sterlng has been proposing for the last few months.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 12:25 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article



> Hey, Mike, did you know that you and your team of poachers recovered 10 

> kilos of

> Carancas?

>

> http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2008/04/04/Features/Professor.Solves.A.Meteor.Mystery-3304236.shtml

>

> Professor solves a meteor mystery

> By: Chaz Firestone

> Posted: 4/4/08

> Last September, something strange landed near the rural Peruvian village 

> of

> Carancas. Two months later, so did Peter Schultz.

>

> One was an extraterrestrial fireball that struck the Earth at 10,000 miles 

> per

> hour, formed a bubbling crater nearly 50 feet wide and afflicted local 

> villagers

> and livestock with a mysterious illness. The other is the Brown geologist 

> who

> may have figured out why.

>

> The fiery mass shot across the morning sky bursting and crackling like

> fireworks, villagers said after the Sept. 15 impact. An explosive crash 

> tossed

> nearby locals to the ground, shattered windows one kilometer away and 

> kicked up

> a massive dust cloud, covering one man from head to toe in a fine white 

> powder.

> Many thought the streaking fireball - brighter than the sun, by some 

> accounts -

> was an aerial attack from neighboring Chile.

>

> Curious shepherds and farmers approached the crash site to find a smoking 

> crater

> reminiscent of a Hollywood film, laden with rocks and stirring with 

> bubbling

> water that emitted a foul vapor. But curiosity turned to fear when 

> unexplained

> symptoms began to crop up in Carancas: headaches, vomiting and skin 

> lesions

> struck more than 150 villagers, Peru's Ministry of Health stated days 

> later.

> Locals reported that their animals lost their appetites and bled from 

> their

> noses. Children were restless and cried through the night.

>

> But according to Schultz, the professor of geological sciences who visited 

> the

> site last December, the true mystery in Carancas is how any of this 

> happened in

> the first place.

>

> Sophisticated theory and conventional wisdom have long agreed that most 

> meteors

> break into fragments and fizzle out before they can reach the Earth's 

> surface.

> Even those large and durable enough to make it through the atmosphere hit 

> the

> ground as ghosts of their former selves, "plopping out of the sky and 

> forming a

> bullet hole in the Earth," Schultz said. "This meteor crashed into the 

> Earth at

> three kilometers per second, exploded and buried itself into the ground."

>

> Last month, Schultz delivered a highly anticipated lecture at the 39th 

> Lunar and

> Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas. And if he's right, the 

> bold

> theory he proposed there may shake loose a "gut response" entrenched 

> within the

> geological, physical and astronomical sciences: "Carancas simply should 

> not have

> happened."

>

>

>

> A Web of speculation

>

> The handful of shepherds who happened to lead their Alpaca herds near the 

> arroyo

> that day may have been the first humans ever to witness an explosive 

> meteor

> impact. But the rest of the world quickly got its chance, if vicariously,

> through a flurry of activity in the blogosphere.

>

> Hundreds of scientists, journalists and captivated amateurs weighed in on 

> the

> bizarre events as they unfolded, offering scores of pet theories and 

> radically

> revising them as more information streamed in from Peru.

>

> Pravda, a Russian online newspaper born out of a print version run by the

> country's former Communist Party, ran the headline "American spy satellite

> downed in Peru as U.S. nuclear attack on Iran thwarted" five days after 

> the

> impact. The story attributes the villagers' illness to radiation poisoning 

> from

> the satellite's plutonium power generator.

>

> Other proposed explanations were less sensational. Nevadan wildlife 

> biologist

> and amateur geologist David Syzdek wrote a Sept. 18 blog post titled 

> "Meteorite

> strike in Peru gassing villagers? Maybe not." In it, he proposed that a 

> mud

> volcano producing toxic gases was responsible for both the illness and the

> crater.

>

> "The Andes are very active geologically so I think there is a good 

> possibility

> that this crater was caused by an outburst of geothermal activity," he 

> wrote.

>

> As for the blinding light shooting across the sky, Syzdek chalked it up to

> coincidence.

>

> "Fireballs are quite common," he wrote. "One possible scenario is that the

> people who saw the fireball just happened on a recently formed mud volcano 

> while

> they were out looking for the fireball impact site."

>

> Though Pravda and Syzdek drew radically different conclusions from the 

> reports,

> what they shared with each other, many bloggers and even some scientists 

> was a

> healthy skepticism about reports coming out of Peru. Pravda and Syzdek 

> both

> pointed out in their posts that an explosion powerful enough to create 

> such a

> large crater would be equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT, or a tactical 

> nuclear

> strike.

>

> "When I first saw the news reports, they just didn't seem right," Syzdek 

> later

> said in an interview. "Explosive impacts like this just don't happen."

>

>

>

> 'A hyperspeed curveball'

>

> Gonzalo Tancredi, a Uruguayan astronomer who collaborated with Schultz in

> Carancas, said initial reports of the impact confounded amateurs and 

> Ph.D.s

> alike. Bewildered scientists even entertained the possibility of a hoax as

> rumors floated around the scientific community.

>

> "At the beginning, there were some doubts about what really happened 

> there,"

> Tancredi said. "We thought maybe it was a meteor fall or maybe it was 

> something

> else, even something fake."

>

> But when Tancredi visited Carancas a few weeks later, what he observed 

> silenced

> the conspiracies and pointed unequivocally to one conclusion.

>

> Tancredi interviewed locals, who reported a large mushroom cloud that 

> formed

> over the crater and compression waves that knocked villagers to the 

> ground. He

> also found pieces of soil and rock that had been launched over three 

> football

> fields from the crater - one piece even pierced the roof of a barn 100 

> meters

> away. Combined with analyses of infrasound detectors and the patterns of 

> crater

> "ejecta," the evidence pointed to a genuine and very powerful meteorite 

> impact.

>

> But the question that remained on everyone's mind was how the meteor got 

> there

> at all - a scientific riddle that was made even more challenging by 

> Michael

> Farmer.

>

> Farmer is a controversial figure in the geological community. He is a 

> meteorite

> hunter, a poacher of alien rocks who travels to impact sites around the 

> world -

> usually the "bullet hole in the Earth" type mentioned by Schultz - and 

> collects

> whatever he can find, often brushing up against authorities and other 

> hunters.

> Meteorite hunting is Farmer's full-time job; he profits from selling what 

> he

> finds.

>

> Farmer, who said he is "totally self-taught" when it comes to meteors, 

> said he

> was as skeptical as the rest when he first heard the reports coming out of 

> Peru

> while on hunt in Spain. But 16 days later, he and his partners found 

> themselves

> staring into the Carancas impact crater, the first Americans on the 

> scene - and

> they stumbled on an extraterrestrial gold mine.

>

> "We got there and just started picking up pieces off the ground," Farmer 

> said.

> "The entire ground was white, just white powder which was all meteor."

>

> Farmer and his team eventually accumulated 10 kilograms of small meteorite

> fragments and sold them to private collectors and universities for an

> astronomical $100 per gram.

>

> But despite his rocky past with the geological community, Farmer and his

> expensive fragments made a priceless contribution to scientists. Within 

> minutes

> of arriving on the scene, Farmer discovered that the Carancas meteorite 

> was a

> chondrite, or stony meteorite, as opposed to an iron meteorite.

>

> Though far more common than iron meteorites, chondrites are highly 

> vulnerable to

> ablation - the cracking, eroding and even exploding that occurs when a 

> meteor

> enters the atmosphere and undergoes extreme changes in temperature and 

> pressure.

> As a result, chondrites are far less likely than the more durable iron

> meteorites to make it to the Earth's surface in large pieces - which makes 

> the

> Carancas meteorite all the more baffling.

>

> "For a while, the only information we were getting was from Farmer's Web 

> site,"

> Schultz said. "This was not the type of object you'd expect to get through 

> the

> atmosphere in a tight clump."

>

> With most pieces of the geological puzzle on the table, the stage was set 

> for

> Schultz to visit the site for himself. But when he arrived there in 

> December

> with a Brown graduate student, Tancredi and Peruvian astrophysicist Jose

> Ishitsuka, a budding geologist actually made the crucial discovery. Scott 

> Harris

> GS said he collected some soil samples "initially out of curiosity" to 

> look for

> evidence of shock deformation, which occurs when an object rapidly 

> decelerates

> in cases like impacts or explosions. When Harris looked at the material 

> under a

> microscope, he found tiny mineral grains that had turned into glass 

> because of

> heat and massive shock forces, indicating a very high-speed impact. Here 

> was yet

> another mystifying piece of evidence.

>

> "At the minimum," Harris said, "this would support a velocity of three

> kilometers per second - a real high-velocity explosion instead of just a 

> plop in

> the ground."

>

> By this time, more reputable scientific theories of the impact had 

> supplanted

> the initial speculation, the most popular of which came from a group in 

> Germany

> and Russia. They proposed that the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere 

> at a

> very shallow angle, allowing it to reach the surface gradually and avoid a

> sudden increase in pressure - "the difference between diving in and doing 

> a

> belly flop," Schultz said.

>

> But their theory's relatively low impact velocity of 180 meters per 

> second, or

> about 400 miles per hour, was consistent with every piece of evidence but

> Harris', which pointed to a velocity of about 10,000 miles per hour at 

> impact.

>

> "This was nature's way of throwing us a curveball," Schultz said. "A 

> hyperspeed

> curveball."

>

>

>

> Changing shape, changing theory

>

> Back home in Providence, Schultz was now faced with the task of fitting 

> the

> puzzle pieces together into a cohesive theory. And to do it, he looked to

> Earth's closest planetary neighbor, Venus.

>

> "Our models make predictions about what kind of objects can make it to the

> surface at what velocity, and the Carancas meteor isn't usually one of 

> them,"

> Schultz said. "But Venus has a much denser atmosphere and we still find 

> craters

> on its surface. How did they get there? I think it might be the same thing

> here."

>

> To explain the alternative theory he developed, Schultz compared a typical

> meteor's descent to a waterskier behind a boat.

>

> "Normally when you're on the outside of the wake, you're pushed out 

> further,"

> Schultz said. "From my experience looking at Venus, I realized that there 

> was a

> certain condition where the waterskier will stay inside the wake, and 

> actually

> get pushed inward."

>

> At last month's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Schultz proposed 

> that

> the meteor did break up into pieces, but shock waves created by the 

> speeding

> mass may have kept them close together. And since the meteor descended as 

> a

> clump of fragments instead of one large piece, it reshaped itself along 

> the way

> to become more aerodynamic, like a football or a javelin cutting through 

> the air

> instead of a poorly shaped hunk of rock.

>

> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said, 

> adding

> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands 

> and

> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that 

> mound

> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the

> friction."

>

> Tancredi, who co-authored the paper with Schultz, Harris and Ishitsuka, 

> said

> Schultz's theory is gaining popularity but is still being debated, even 

> among

> the group that proposed it.

>

> "This is the hot question right now," he said. "We still have to 

> demonstrate

> that this phenomenon is possible."

>

> In the meantime, another hot question had remained without a definitive 

> answer -

> the etiology of the strange illness that afflicted the people of Carancas. 

> But

> the group may solve that mystery, too.

>

> Schultz, Harris and Tancredi all dismissed the possibility of the 

> meteorite

> emitting harmful gases that would sicken villagers. Instead, they proposed 

> a

> simpler cause: the power of the mind.

>

> The meteorite impact sent out a powerful compression wave that knocked 

> nearby

> villagers and animals to the ground and injected the soil with air, which 

> later

> bubbled up through the crater. Shepherds and cattle may also have breathed 

> in

> the thick dust thrown up by the crash and smelled the sulfurous gases 

> produced

> as water reacted with iron sulfide in the meteor.

>

> But what the group thinks later spread through the town was not disease, 

> but

> panic.

>

> "We think it was probably more of a psychological response," Harris said, 

> adding

> that commonplace symptoms like headaches and nausea could easily have been

> caused by the disorienting impact and then mirrored by frightened 

> villagers.

>

> Harris also admitted the possibility of the meteorite releasing arsenic

> deposits, which are known to exist in Peru, but said it would be very 

> unlikely

> for those gases to have caused the illness.

>

> "In order to really get arsenic poisoning, you'd need high 

> concentrations," he

> said. "You'd have to be there inhaling the vapor filled with the stuff 

> right

> after the meteorite hit."

>

> Poisonous or not, the Carancas meteorite could have important implications 

> for

> public safety. Tancredi said there's no reason an impact like this 

> couldn't

> happen in a major city, wiping out a few city blocks. He also pointed out 

> that

> today's most advanced meteor detectors aren't nearly powerful enough to 

> detect

> an object as small as the Carancas meteorite.

>

> "Near-Earth detectors detect objects that could create a global 

> catastrophe,

> something maybe a kilometer across," he said. "We don't have any kind of

> technology that could detect this object before reaching the atmosphere, 

> so it

> will not be possible to know when and where one of these objects could 

> strike

> again."

>

> But Schultz said the most important lesson to learn from Carancas is that 

> the

> foundation of good science is hard empirical evidence, even - and 

> especially -

> when it contradicts established principle.

>

> "We tried to understand what the rocks told us rather than looking at the

> theory," he said. "Nature trumps theory, every time."

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