[meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos

From: Michael L Blood <mlblood_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:33:37 -0700
Message-ID: <C32869B1.FBCA%mlblood_at_cox.net>

Perhaps I am dumber than a bag of hammers, but
I am confused.... Are Carnacas and Titicaca two separate falls
Or one in the same? Is anyone else confused on this issue?
        Michael

on 10/2/07 5:59 PM, Michael Farmer at meteoriteguy at yahoo.com wrote:

> Chris, it is a hell of a crater, at least 13 meters in
> diameter, more than one meter of uplift, looks
> identical to Meteor Crater to me, on a much smaller
> scale.
> There in fact does seem to be shocked material at the
> crater, I found only inside and just outside the
> crater, large pieces of compacted sandstone, yet there
> is no sandstone there, it seems to have solidified on
> the impact, everything else is more like soft mud.
> Large, and I mean larger pieces of sod, weighing at
> least 40 or 50 kilograms were thrown more than 50-100
> meters, and smaller dirt clod debris thrown up to 15o
> meters in all directions. This is a serious impact, I
> mean you can call it what you want, but with the
> uplift, the incredible debris field thrown to all
> sides, the huge size, and volume of the crater itself,
> certainly leads me to believe that the mass weighed
> many tons and is obviously in the hole under some
> meters of fallback debris. The locals report mushroom
> cloud lingered for more than a hour.
> As far as more pieces, this meterite came in over lake
> Titikaka, and if you have never seen this lake, it is
> HUGE! I would guess that as fragil as the meteorite
> is, that tons of debris fell off but would most likely
> have all fallen into the lake, or perhaps some on the
> mountains just inside of Bolivia. It is not populated
> there, and I assume from talking to most witnesses,
> that the large main mass, which was a massive ball of
> fire much larger and brighter than the Sun, caught
> everyones attention pretty well, and would be so
> bright that smaller pieces would be drowned out by the
> intensity of the main mass. That is what I think
> happened, surely many more pieces broke off but from
> where the main mass hit, back down the flightpath is
> nothing but swamps and high mountains for about 10
> miles, then 15 miles of lake. Perfect for most
> material to be lost.
> Michael Farmer
> --- Chris Peterson <clp at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>
>> What remains to be determined is if this is actually
>> a crater, or just a
>> big splash. In the first case, some shocked material
>> should show up, and
>> I think it's likely that nothing is left in the
>> bottom. If there really
>> is a big meteorite at the bottom, then this probably
>> isn't a crater in
>> the usual sense (that is, produced by a large energy
>> release as the
>> parent body explodes/vaporizes).
>>
>> I don't believe I've seen anything credible to
>> suggest that the water
>> was actually boiling or steaming. It doesn't take
>> much energy to make a
>> hole this size in soft ground- probably around 100
>> kg TNT equivalent.
>> And that's not enough to heat up that much water
>> very much. So I expect
>> that any apparent bubbling was nothing more than an
>> effect of ground
>> water filling in the new hole.
>>
>> If the recovered material is shocked fragments, it
>> may be structurally
>> quite different from the parent body.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> *****************************************
>> Chris L Peterson
>> Cloudbait Observatory
>> http://www.cloudbait.com
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 5:37 PM
>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail
>> photos
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 15:54:57 -0700 (PDT), you
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is it indeed possible that a mass of say 3-7 tons
>>>> could cause such intense heat on impact? We think
>> that
>>>> the compression of the soil, in an instant to many
>>>> meteors deep could also cause intense heating.
>>>> Every person we interviewed decribed boiling
>> water,
>>>> lots of steam, and horrible sulfer type smell. The
>>>
>>> What I wonder is if maybe the pressure/heat could
>> have caused
>>> dissolved gases to
>>> bubble out from the water? So it might not have
>> been at a boiling
>>> temperature,
>>> but still bubbling/steaming? Too bad we don't
>> have samples of the
>>> groundwater
>>> and soil from the area to see if there is anything
>> weird/extensively
>>> poluted
>>> about it.
>>>
>>> Also odd, of course, is a fraglie, porus stone as
>> you describe
>>> surviving to the
>>> ground big enough and fast enough to make the
>> crater.
>>
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--
"God doesn't look at how much we do, but with how
much love we do it."
    Mother Teresa
-- 
When Jesus said, "Love your enemies" I think he
probably meant don't kill them.

Received on Wed 03 Oct 2007 12:33:37 AM PDT