[meteorite-list] The Fate of a Kansas Meteorite Crater - a repost (part 1)

From: bernd.pauli_at_paulinet.de <bernd.pauli_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Nov 18 15:08:53 2005
Message-ID: <DIIE.0000003400003FD9_at_paulinet.de>

PECK ELLIS (1979) The Fate of a Kansas Meteorite
Crater (Sky & Telescope, August 1979, pp. 126-128):

The rich farmland of Kiowa County, Kansas, is devoid of normal stones, but lots of odd,
heavy ones dotted it when homesteaders arrived there in the 1870's. Some of these strange
looking rocks were used to hold down rain-barrel covers, to anchor dugout roofs, or to plug
fence holes.
The first person to recognize these as meteorites was Eliza Kimberly, who moved to a farm
there in 1885 with her new husband, Frank. When she was a girl, her schoolteacher had shown
her class a meteorite that had fallen at Estherville, Iowa.
She gathered up meteorites from her farm for five years before anyone else was persuaded of
their value. Finally a professor answered her invitation to examine the objects, and began a
small meteorite rush that earned her hundreds of dollars. Fully vindicated in the eyes of her
husband and community, her "meteorite farm" became well known for its extra crop.
Technically, these meteorites are pallasites - masses of nickel-iron, enclosing nodules of the
yellow-green mineral olivine. They feel denser than most stones, and when weathered look rusty
brown.
In 1923, Harvey H. Nininger, then a science professor at McPherson College in central Kansas,
became interested in meteorites and visited the Kimberly farm. He bought some samples from
the now elderly couple, and returned in 1927 to buy a 465-pound (212-kg) specimen turned up
by a plowboy. When Nininger chatted with the Kimberlys in 1929, they mentioned an old buffalo
wallow where several good pieces of pallasite had been found, along with a lot of oxidized frag-
ments.
Curious, Nininger asked to see the place, and was led across a field to a ridge that formed an
elliptical ring around a shallow depression about 40 by 60 feet across. To Frank, this depression
was only an old wallow that had always held rainwater longer than any other place in the flat fields.
It was a bit of a nuisance, and he systematically plowed so as to flatten it. But his plow had struck
a 68-pound (31-kg) meteorite there, and his wife had picked up a bushel or more of small fragments.

Nininger immediately recognized the hole as the crater from a meteorite impact. He had recently
explored the Arizona and the Odessa, Texas, craters, so he was as familiar as anyone with how
impact scars should look. He suspected the wallow was blasted out of the plain by a large mass
of the same shower that dropped all the other meteorites (a larger mass than had been recovered previous to that time).
Received on Fri 18 Nov 2005 03:08:51 PM PST