[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

[Michael Farmer]

Yeah, like most reporters, they always mess things up.
I told them that a total of ~10 kilos was recovered.
mike


--- Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net> wrote:


> 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.

> 

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