[meteorite-list] Million's of Dollars of Tunguska Meteorites may be located, just like Chelyabinsk's Meteorites: OUTSIDE of, NOT INSIDE, the Blast Zone.

From: Michael Farmer <mike_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 19:38:29 +0300
Message-ID: <B4FF5593-F199-4465-B203-DA1BDBD103B8_at_meteoriteguy.com>

The meteorites fell far from Chelyabinsk, an hour drive. As a guy who was just there this morning and had quite a nice hunt for the last two weeks, I assure you the damage done to Chelyabinsk as the meteorite passed overhead was nothing to do with impact, but rather the large air bursts as it passed overhead.
Tunguska was many magnitudes larger than Sikhote-Alin! Chelyabinsk's energy was released in the many air bursts you can see and hear on the videos. That is why millions of tiny peas rained down. It also seems that every burst created a new "mini" strewn-field rather than typical sorted strewn-field.
At Chelyabinsk 1 gram stones can be found 1 meter from 1 kg stones. I found a 503 gram stone and a 13 gram stone about 10 meters from each other. Very few larger pieces have been found, all less than 2 kg to my knowledge. Heavy forests and lakes hide most of the meteorite forever.
Michael Farmer

Sent from my iPhone

On May 5, 2013, at 7:28 PM, Steve Arnold <meteorhntr at aol.com> wrote:

> Million's of Dollars of Tunguska Meteorites may be located, just like Chelyabinsk's Meteorites: OUTSIDE of, NOT INSIDE, the Blast Zone.
>
> Help!
>
> OK, I am not a rocket scientist that understands all the physics of fireball entry, "blast zones," break ups and distribution of meteorite fragments on the ground, however some of you are. So tell me if I am way off the mark here?
>
> Robert Beauford and I were talking about Chelyabinsk shortly after the fall and he asked how many Chelyabinsk meteorites were being found in the city of Chelyabinsk, where all the windows had been blasted out? I told him that, as I understood it, the strewnfield was farther "down stream" because inertia carried the rocks further beyond the blast, like what almost always happens with fireballs. We later talked about how the Tunguska event of June 30, 1908, was bigger than Chelyabinsk it seemed, but probably not as big as the 101 crater forming event of Sikhote Alin, Russia of Feb. 12, 1947. Certainly, Tunguska was not as big as what caused the near-mile-wide Barringer Crater in Arizona. All of a sudden, it hit Robert..."Maybe there really should be Tunguska meteorites, but not where everyone has been looking for the last 105 years!"
>
> It seemed like an extremely obvious conclusion to me!
>
> Have we not learned anything from Barringer? There are NOT meteorites at the bottom of that "blast zone," right?
>
> Have we not learned anything from Chelyabinsk? There are NOT meteorites sitting amongst the broken glass in that "blast zone," right?
>
> So why would there be Tunguska meteorites amongst the fallen trees at the Tunguska blast zone?
>
> It seems too obvious of a question to not to have been asked years ago, so I assume someone smarter than us has done so already, and that someone has poked all the holes into that theory, and thus they moved on to the "Comet made of ice" theory as the best plausible explanation.
>
> Unless Tunguska was close to a perpendicular - straight down - impact, inertia should carry the Tunguska meteorite specimens farther along if any survived, right? But even with a straight down trajectory, we have learned from Doppler data, in more recent falls, that wind can move specimens substantial distances during the dark flight portion of their fall, so even then, if it was windy that fateful day in 1908, the strewnfield still could have been moved after the blast occurred.
>
> Tunguska was not a crater forming event, so there should not be a "splash zone" such as what Barringer's Crater has with Canyon Diablo meteorites. It should have a many-kilometer-long typical looking strewnfield that might start as close as just outside the fallen tree blast zone or, depending on angle of entry, it could start and finish many dozens of kilometers farther "down stream."
>
> Sutter's Mill taught us that a huge mass can ablate away by over 99.9% coming in. And if Tunguska was made of comet ice or made of a loosely held together rubble pile of asteroid debris, then sure, it could have all vaporized, yet not made a crater or strewnfield...I suppose? But maybe not? Again, I didn't do all that well in math in school, much less understand the physics to know what is big enough or too big to produce craters or to totally vaporize the mass.
>
> So, if Robert and I are wrong, I would like to know why.
>
> If we are right, WHERE should someone be looking to actually find the potentially millions of dollars of meteorites that have been waiting to be found all this time?
>
> Maybe Chelyabinsk will be even more important than we thought...especially if it helps us answer the biggest mystery in the history of fireball events: What caused the Tunguska Event?
>
>
> Steve Arnold
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Received on Sun 05 May 2013 12:38:29 PM PDT