[meteorite-list] Meteorite Men Comment

From: Paul Heinrich <oxytropidoceras_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:48:02 -0600
Message-ID: <4B88B212.6010006_at_cox.net>

Dear Friends,

Meteorite Men is a great show. personally, I feel
that it has a nice mix of science, humor, entertainment,
and droll, low-key "adventure" that many shows needs
to have.

 From my job, I can tell that bit definitely has generated
a lot of interest in Louisiana, with a very definite increase
in inquiries, about meteorites and meteorite hunting
received by other geologists and I. There have been a
bunch of rocks, some of which have been lying in people's
closests for decades. Unfortunately, they have so far
been meterwrongs and even one craterwrong. However,
a person never knows when that meteorite that has been
either sitting in someone''s porch as doorstop or in their
garage for the past few years will finally make it way
into my or some other geologist's office possibly because
of the interest generated by "Meteorite Men".

One of the more strange meteorwrongs was a gneiss
boulder about 1.5 to 2 meters in diameter that got pulled
up in a fishing net off Grand Island, Lafourche Parish.
The most frustrating meteorwrongs in Louisiana are
"bog iron ores", which form in permanently saturated
coastal plain soils and often are associated with springs.
Pieces of this material have an unfortunate tendency of
being dense, pitch black, and even magnetic. Certain
pieces are troublesome because neither I nor any other
geologist feel comfortable, despite what intuition says,
about judging them as definite meteorwrongs without
being able to inspect them in person.

I have been tempted to suggest to to a soil scientist, whom
I worked with, that looking at the genesis of these "bog
iron ores" would be a worthwhile project for a Masters
thesis for some student. I and another geologist can at least
now point out a number of places where they can be
studied. They have a strange, although quite terrestrial,
mineralogy.

Yours,

Paul H.
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
http://www.scribd.com/etchplain
Received on Sat 27 Feb 2010 12:48:02 AM PST