[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Michael Farmer <meteoriteguy_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 20:59:46 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <481202.90688.qm_at_web33108.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

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 Fri 04 Apr 2008 11:59:46 PM PDT