[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Jeff Kuyken <info_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 15:03:29 +1100
Message-ID: <49EF80D6BC9D4AF28E4EE545EC67BA9D_at_JeffPC>

Thanks for the quick reply Mike. I heard that up to three quarters of the
recovered material was dust so that seems to fit.

Cheers,

Jeff


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Farmer" <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
To: "Jeff Kuyken" <info at meteorites.com.au>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> At least 5 to 6 kilos was dust, I know of about 4
> kilos of fragments.
> Mike
> --- Jeff Kuyken <info at meteorites.com.au> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
> === message truncated ===
>
>
>
Received on Sat 05 Apr 2008 12:03:29 AM PDT