[meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos

From: Jeff Kuyken <info_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 19:12:05 +1000
Message-ID: <00ba01c80666$a3bd6b70$4001a8c0_at_mandin4f89ypwu>

It makes me wonder what soil/rock layers there are at the impact site. If
there are some samples of the harder rock that Mike mentions maybe it is an
indication of how deep the impactor went as it may have thrown up material
from deeper down. Just a thought. Given how wet and muddy the surface layer
seems to be, it's not hard to see that such a large mass might penetrate
quite deeply down.

Cheers,

Jeff


----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Farmer
To: Chris Peterson ; meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 10:59 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos


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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> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
>
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>

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Received on Thu 04 Oct 2007 05:12:05 AM PDT