[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Michael Farmer <meteoriteguy_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 08:46:11 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <147669.66526.qm_at_web33107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Yeah, like most reporters, they always mess things up.
I told them that a total of ~10 kilos was recovered.
mike


--- Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
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Received on Fri 04 Apr 2008 11:46:11 AM PDT