[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

[Sean T. Murray]

So... a Ford Taurus is an example of a vehicle with miminal friction?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jerry" <grf2 at verizon.net>
To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 3:39 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article



> "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."

>> ______________________________________________

>> http://www.meteoritecentral.com

>> Meteorite-list mailing list

>> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com

>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list

>

> ______________________________________________

> http://www.meteoritecentral.com

> Meteorite-list mailing list

> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com

> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list

>