[meteorite-list] Re Cu meteorite

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:56:31 -0500
Message-ID: <01d101c8e48b$acae4bb0$db5de146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Larry, List,

    No one interested in things that fall from the sky
should omit reading the four books of Charles Fort.
Fort was a reporter-turned-researcher around 1900.
He wrote in the 1920's. He collected "impossible"
facts soberly reported in everything from major
newspapers to scholarly journals. They are a gold
mine of data. Fort was a skeptic (of everything
including science) and only satiric in suggesting
explanations. He's very readable.

    Apparently, everything you can think of (and a
few things you never thought of) have fallen from the
sky. Freeman Dyson, who suggested the fish from
Europa arriving freeze-dried on Earth, got the idea
after reading Fort.

    And Fort always finds delightfully embarassing
scientific opinions, like this one:

    "As late as November, 1902, in _Nature Notes_,
13-231, a member of the Selborne Society still argued
that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are
masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place,"
that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is
mistaken for a falling, luminous object..."

    There are lists of events described at the time as
"earthquakes" where ground shocks are accompanied
by high winds, bright lights in the sky or "meteors,"
dark clouds, explosions, black rains, none of which
have any connection whatsoever with earthquakes but
which sound a great deal like airbursts to me.


Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: <lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu>
To: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
Cc: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 3:16 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Re Cu meteorite


Hi again:

I forgot the other article in the May, 2006 issue of Meteorite: Ice
Meteorites by John Saul which lists 200 years of ice falling from the sky.
I am assuming that the most of the early ones do not come from the leaking
toilets of planes. My mind remains open on this.

Larry


On Sat, July 12, 2008 11:36 am, Sterling K. Webb wrote:
> Hi, Darren, List,
>
>
> Good for you; you've landed on a controversy!
> The existence (or non-existence) of cryometeors
> and megacryometeors. The principal researcher of this topic is Jes?s
> Mart?nez-Fr?as, author of:
> http://tierra.rediris.es/publipapers/megacryometeors_ambio.pdf
>
>
> The record hailstone for the US is less than 8
> inches in diameter but in 1995 in Zhejiang, China, a block of ice roughly
> a
> meter on a side and weghing about a ton was witnessed to fall.
>
> Cratering events are recorded. Are any of them
> from "outer space"? Every cryometeor tested has had the isotopic signature
> (deuterium) of plain ol'
> earthly water...
>
> The question is: how the h*** does the atmosphere
> form and support a one-ton block of ice? No theory of the atmosphere even
> vauguely suggests any way...
>
> Oddly for such a large number of well-attested
> events, most internet science forums and astronomy sites routinely blow
> off
> questions about big chunks of ice falling from the sky as urban myths,
> more UFO fantasies, whacky ignorance...
>
> What? Rocks falling from the sky? Nonsense.
>
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:58 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Re Cu meteorite
>
>
>
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:10:04 -0600, you wrote:
>
>
>> It turns out that even a big block of ice can survive passage through
>> the atmosphere. The outside ablates away, the interior never warms up.
>
> Any numbers on how big the block would have to be? How small the
> surviving piece could be? I'm thinking of some of those chunks of ice
> that fall from the sky some times. Most come from planes. Could some be
> cometary? ______________________________________________
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Received on Sat 12 Jul 2008 09:56:31 PM PDT