[meteorite-list] Tagish Lake

From: Michael Farmer <meteoriteguy_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:41:16 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <891225.20529.qm_at_web33107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

There is absolutely no way to recover more Tagish
Lake. The meteorite is extremely fragile, it crumbles
if you touch it when broken into fragments. A complete
unbroken stone may be able to survive, but not in that
environment. Constant freezing and thawing would
destroy the stones from the inside as they suck up
water like a sponge.
The lake itself is over 1000 feet deep! It is an
extremely narrow valley between two large mountain
ranges. You can all forget about recovery of more
Tagish Lake meteorites. The Canadians lost it all when
they closed off the site to all but a few people, who
took two months to make a neat little map of locations
of pieces frozen into the ice, then lost them all when
a fast thaw came along. Great job scientists, you lost
99% of the rarest meteorite fall on the planet because
you wanted to keep it all secret and to yourselves.
Now when someone wants to do a paper, they need to
apply for a tiny, nearly useless crumb of material
when they could have saved many many kilos for such
studies.
Michael Farmer
Received on Thu 21 Dec 2006 01:41:16 PM PST