[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Jerry <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:39:19 -0400
Message-ID: <680182C380A84F4B8CF4BB0C6B8B255E_at_Notebook>

"It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said,
adding
that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands
and
land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that
mound
will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
friction."
Just wht Sterlng has been proposing for the last few months.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 12:25 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> 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.
>
> Farmer, who said he is "totally self-taught" when it comes to meteors,
> said he
> was as skeptical as the rest when he first heard the reports coming out of
> Peru
> while on hunt in Spain. But 16 days later, he and his partners found
> themselves
> staring into the Carancas impact crater, the first Americans on the
> scene - and
> they stumbled on an extraterrestrial gold mine.
>
> "We got there and just started picking up pieces off the ground," Farmer
> said.
> "The entire ground was white, just white powder which was all meteor."
>
> Farmer and his team eventually accumulated 10 kilograms of small meteorite
> fragments and sold them to private collectors and universities for an
> astronomical $100 per gram.
>
> But despite his rocky past with the geological community, Farmer and his
> expensive fragments made a priceless contribution to scientists. Within
> minutes
> of arriving on the scene, Farmer discovered that the Carancas meteorite
> was a
> chondrite, or stony meteorite, as opposed to an iron meteorite.
>
> Though far more common than iron meteorites, chondrites are highly
> vulnerable to
> ablation - the cracking, eroding and even exploding that occurs when a
> meteor
> enters the atmosphere and undergoes extreme changes in temperature and
> pressure.
> As a result, chondrites are far less likely than the more durable iron
> meteorites to make it to the Earth's surface in large pieces - which makes
> the
> Carancas meteorite all the more baffling.
>
> "For a while, the only information we were getting was from Farmer's Web
> site,"
> Schultz said. "This was not the type of object you'd expect to get through
> the
> atmosphere in a tight clump."
>
> With most pieces of the geological puzzle on the table, the stage was set
> for
> Schultz to visit the site for himself. But when he arrived there in
> December
> with a Brown graduate student, Tancredi and Peruvian astrophysicist Jose
> Ishitsuka, a budding geologist actually made the crucial discovery. Scott
> Harris
> GS said he collected some soil samples "initially out of curiosity" to
> look for
> evidence of shock deformation, which occurs when an object rapidly
> decelerates
> in cases like impacts or explosions. When Harris looked at the material
> under a
> microscope, he found tiny mineral grains that had turned into glass
> because of
> heat and massive shock forces, indicating a very high-speed impact. Here
> was yet
> another mystifying piece of evidence.
>
> "At the minimum," Harris said, "this would support a velocity of three
> kilometers per second - a real high-velocity explosion instead of just a
> plop in
> the ground."
>
> By this time, more reputable scientific theories of the impact had
> supplanted
> the initial speculation, the most popular of which came from a group in
> Germany
> and Russia. They proposed that the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere
> at a
> very shallow angle, allowing it to reach the surface gradually and avoid a
> sudden increase in pressure - "the difference between diving in and doing
> a
> belly flop," Schultz said.
>
> But their theory's relatively low impact velocity of 180 meters per
> second, or
> about 400 miles per hour, was consistent with every piece of evidence but
> Harris', which pointed to a velocity of about 10,000 miles per hour at
> impact.
>
> "This was nature's way of throwing us a curveball," Schultz said. "A
> hyperspeed
> curveball."
>
>
>
> Changing shape, changing theory
>
> Back home in Providence, Schultz was now faced with the task of fitting
> the
> puzzle pieces together into a cohesive theory. And to do it, he looked to
> Earth's closest planetary neighbor, Venus.
>
> "Our models make predictions about what kind of objects can make it to the
> surface at what velocity, and the Carancas meteor isn't usually one of
> them,"
> Schultz said. "But Venus has a much denser atmosphere and we still find
> craters
> on its surface. How did they get there? I think it might be the same thing
> here."
>
> To explain the alternative theory he developed, Schultz compared a typical
> meteor's descent to a waterskier behind a boat.
>
> "Normally when you're on the outside of the wake, you're pushed out
> further,"
> Schultz said. "From my experience looking at Venus, I realized that there
> was a
> certain condition where the waterskier will stay inside the wake, and
> actually
> get pushed inward."
>
> At last month's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Schultz proposed
> that
> the meteor did break up into pieces, but shock waves created by the
> speeding
> mass may have kept them close together. And since the meteor descended as
> a
> clump of fragments instead of one large piece, it reshaped itself along
> the way
> to become more aerodynamic, like a football or a javelin cutting through
> the air
> instead of a poorly shaped hunk of rock.
>
> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said,
> adding
> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands
> and
> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that
> mound
> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
> friction."
>
> Tancredi, who co-authored the paper with Schultz, Harris and Ishitsuka,
> said
> Schultz's theory is gaining popularity but is still being debated, even
> among
> the group that proposed it.
>
> "This is the hot question right now," he said. "We still have to
> demonstrate
> that this phenomenon is possible."
>
> In the meantime, another hot question had remained without a definitive
> answer -
> the etiology of the strange illness that afflicted the people of Carancas.
> But
> the group may solve that mystery, too.
>
> Schultz, Harris and Tancredi all dismissed the possibility of the
> meteorite
> emitting harmful gases that would sicken villagers. Instead, they proposed
> a
> simpler cause: the power of the mind.
>
> The meteorite impact sent out a powerful compression wave that knocked
> nearby
> villagers and animals to the ground and injected the soil with air, which
> later
> bubbled up through the crater. Shepherds and cattle may also have breathed
> in
> the thick dust thrown up by the crash and smelled the sulfurous gases
> produced
> as water reacted with iron sulfide in the meteor.
>
> But what the group thinks later spread through the town was not disease,
> but
> panic.
>
> "We think it was probably more of a psychological response," Harris said,
> adding
> that commonplace symptoms like headaches and nausea could easily have been
> caused by the disorienting impact and then mirrored by frightened
> villagers.
>
> Harris also admitted the possibility of the meteorite releasing arsenic
> deposits, which are known to exist in Peru, but said it would be very
> unlikely
> for those gases to have caused the illness.
>
> "In order to really get arsenic poisoning, you'd need high
> concentrations," he
> said. "You'd have to be there inhaling the vapor filled with the stuff
> right
> after the meteorite hit."
>
> Poisonous or not, the Carancas meteorite could have important implications
> for
> public safety. Tancredi said there's no reason an impact like this
> couldn't
> happen in a major city, wiping out a few city blocks. He also pointed out
> that
> today's most advanced meteor detectors aren't nearly powerful enough to
> detect
> an object as small as the Carancas meteorite.
>
> "Near-Earth detectors detect objects that could create a global
> catastrophe,
> something maybe a kilometer across," he said. "We don't have any kind of
> technology that could detect this object before reaching the atmosphere,
> so it
> will not be possible to know when and where one of these objects could
> strike
> again."
>
> But Schultz said the most important lesson to learn from Carancas is that
> the
> foundation of good science is hard empirical evidence, even - and
> especially -
> when it contradicts established principle.
>
> "We tried to understand what the rocks told us rather than looking at the
> theory," he said. "Nature trumps theory, every time."
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Received on Fri 04 Apr 2008 03:39:19 PM PDT