[meteorite-list] Buzzard Coulee? Please let that be the name!

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:57:17 -0500
Message-ID: <elblj4d1m2p9fmm1lbpj43n12ddnfva275_at_4ax.com>

http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/third_page/story.html?id=d566c1a9-e9b6-4941-86b4-d3996a3e0620

Some great columns are best left unwritten
 
Les MacPherson
The StarPhoenix

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Some of my favourite newspaper columns are the ones I didn't write.

Consider, for example, the column I recently didn't write about the great
meteorite, the disintegrated remains of which spectacularly fell to Earth the
other week near Lloydminster. Scientists and treasure hunters by the hundreds
promptly descended on the remote scene in hopes of finding fragments. By
triangulating independent observations of the fireball, they reportedly had
narrowed down the search area to about 10 square miles.

Even so, I doubted they'd find so much as a particle. Ten square miles is a vast
area to search for bits of blackened rock. In an area that size, you'd be lucky
to find your way back to the car.

It didn't help the fields would mostly be covered in stubble, pasture and bush
and strewn with innumerable stones that are not meteorites. If you shanked a $5
golf ball into this stuff, you wouldn't bother to look for it.

This, to me, is familiar territory. I have spent long hours combing exactly this
kind of terrain for partridge or prairie chicken I've shot. In that case, the
search area is just a few square yards and, still, a downed bird is exceedingly
difficult to find. You have to almost step on it before you can see the thing.

Finding fragments of a meteorite would be much more difficult, I thought. They'd
be buried in the dirt like spent bullets, concealed under shrubbery and
scattered among countless, look-alike stones blackened, not by a meteoric fusion
crust, but by prairie dirt. You might as well try and pick fly specks out of
pepper.

My intention was to write a column expressing condolences for the meteorite
hunters who were wasting their time. I would compare them to the dreamers who
since the 1960s have fruitlessly scanned the airwaves for signals from space
aliens. It's a bit sad to think of them waiting by the phone for 40 years. If
they ever do get the call, they should let it ring a few times before answering
so the aliens won't think they were waiting by the phone.

I also meant to invoke in my column the equally fruitless search for life on
Mars, still unconfirmed after dozens of unmanned spacecraft have flown by,
orbited or landed on the inhospitable planet.

Undismayed by the succession of dry holes, space agencies are planning further
missions to seek out life on Mars. These would be the same kind of people who
would scour the Earth to find an errant golf ball, no matter how long it takes.
You have to admire their perseverance, so long as you're not playing behind
them.

My meteorite column would also make mention of the inauspicious omens.

The area where it landed, for instance, is known as Buzzard Coulee. No
successful project has ever been associated with a buzzard. I only hoped no
searchers would get lost and find out why it's called Buzzard Coulee.

I was just sitting down to chronicle the futility at Buzzard Coulee when all
hell broke loose in Ottawa. Now preoccupied by a keystone coalition trying to
hijack a government that Canadians just elected, I dropped the supercilious
meteorite column in favour of indignant political commentary. Thus was I spared
the profound embarrassment of predicting in print on the very day the first
fragments were found that no fragment would ever be found.

The first piece reportedly was discovered by a student with a team from the
University of Calgary, who saw it embedded in pond ice. Pure luck, I thought at
first. Even a blind hog occasionally finds an acorn.

Except it wasn't luck. Searchers have since gathered more than 70 pieces,
ranging in size from pea gravel to chunks as big as a soccer ball. What I
haven't heard yet is of anyone who was searching and hasn't found a piece. That
said, you have to wonder how many undistinguished field stones will be displayed
on fireplace mantles as fragments of the famous Buzzard Coulee meteorite.

Astronomers say it probably originated in the rocky asteroid belt between the
orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Likely the 10-ton space rock was pulled out of orbit
by Jupiter's gravity and then sent on a new trajectory that eventually
intersected with Buzzard Coulee. What I'd like to know now is why no one saw it
coming.

lmacpherson at sp.canwest.com
Received on Sat 06 Dec 2008 11:57:17 AM PST