[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Jeff Kuyken <info_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 14:56:57 +1100
Message-ID: <2C307A2DB5534AE8AF4D58CAAB6C062D_at_JeffPC>

Hey Mike & all. Is there any idea how much of that ~10kgs was in the dust
form? I heard that there was more dust than decent fragments but don't know
if that's true.

Cheers,

Jeff


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Farmer" <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 2:46 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> 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.
>>
> === message truncated ===
>
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Received on Fri 04 Apr 2008 11:56:57 PM PDT