[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

[Jeff Kuyken]

Hey Mike & all. Is there any idea how much of that ~10kgs was in the dust 
form? I heard that there was more dust than decent fragments but don't know 
if that's true.

Cheers,

Jeff


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Farmer" <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 2:46 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article



> 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.

>>

> === message truncated ===

>

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