[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Jerry <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:11:22 -0400
Message-ID: <E684CA28027E42CBB8FD21A35AD5646A_at_Notebook>

True, rather poor choice. I'm just quoting.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean T. Murray" <stm at bellsouth.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> So... a Ford Taurus is an example of a vehicle with miminal friction?
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jerry" <grf2 at verizon.net>
> To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
> Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 3:39 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article
>
>
>> "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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>>
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Received on Fri 04 Apr 2008 05:11:22 PM PDT