[meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos

[Chris Peterson]

What remains to be determined is if this is actually a crater, or just a 
big splash. In the first case, some shocked material should show up, and 
I think it's likely that nothing is left in the bottom. If there really 
is a big meteorite at the bottom, then this probably isn't a crater in 
the usual sense (that is, produced by a large energy release as the 
parent body explodes/vaporizes).

I don't believe I've seen anything credible to suggest that the water 
was actually boiling or steaming. It doesn't take much energy to make a 
hole this size in soft ground- probably around 100 kg TNT equivalent. 
And that's not enough to heat up that much water very much. So I expect 
that any apparent bubbling was nothing more than an effect of ground 
water filling in the new hole.

If the recovered material is shocked fragments, it may be structurally 
quite different from the parent body.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos


> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 15:54:57 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
>
>>Is it indeed possible that a mass of say 3-7 tons
>>could cause such intense heat on impact? We think that
>>the compression of the soil, in an instant to many
>>meteors deep could also cause intense heating.
>>Every person we interviewed decribed boiling water,
>>lots of steam, and horrible sulfer type smell. The
>
> What I wonder is if maybe the pressure/heat could have caused 
> dissolved gases to
> bubble out from the water?  So it might not have been at a boiling 
> temperature,
> but still bubbling/steaming?  Too bad we don't have samples of the 
> groundwater
> and soil from the area to see if there is anything weird/extensively 
> poluted
> about it.
>
> Also odd, of course, is a fraglie, porus stone as you describe 
> surviving to the
> ground big enough and fast enough to make the crater.