[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

[Sean T. Murray]

So... a Ford Taurus is an example of a vehicle with miminal friction?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jerry" <grf2 at verizon.net>
To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 3:39 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said, 
> adding
> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands 
> and
> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that 
> mound
> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
> friction."
> Just wht Sterlng has been proposing for the last few months.
> Jerry Flaherty
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
> Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 12:25 PM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article
>
>
>> Hey, Mike, did you know that you and your team of poachers recovered 10 
>> kilos of
>> Carancas?
>>
>> http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2008/04/04/Features/Professor.Solves.A.Meteor.Mystery-3304236.shtml
>>
>> Professor solves a meteor mystery
>> By: Chaz Firestone
>> Posted: 4/4/08
>> Last September, something strange landed near the rural Peruvian village 
>> of
>> Carancas. Two months later, so did Peter Schultz.
>>
>> One was an extraterrestrial fireball that struck the Earth at 10,000 
>> miles per
>> hour, formed a bubbling crater nearly 50 feet wide and afflicted local 
>> villagers
>> and livestock with a mysterious illness. The other is the Brown geologist 
>> who
>> may have figured out why.
>>
>> The fiery mass shot across the morning sky bursting and crackling like
>> fireworks, villagers said after the Sept. 15 impact. An explosive crash 
>> tossed
>> nearby locals to the ground, shattered windows one kilometer away and 
>> kicked up
>> a massive dust cloud, covering one man from head to toe in a fine white 
>> powder.
>> Many thought the streaking fireball - brighter than the sun, by some 
>> accounts -
>> was an aerial attack from neighboring Chile.
>>
>> Curious shepherds and farmers approached the crash site to find a smoking 
>> crater
>> reminiscent of a Hollywood film, laden with rocks and stirring with 
>> bubbling
>> water that emitted a foul vapor. But curiosity turned to fear when 
>> unexplained
>> symptoms began to crop up in Carancas: headaches, vomiting and skin 
>> lesions
>> struck more than 150 villagers, Peru's Ministry of Health stated days 
>> later.
>> Locals reported that their animals lost their appetites and bled from 
>> their
>> noses. Children were restless and cried through the night.
>>
>> But according to Schultz, the professor of geological sciences who 
>> visited the
>> site last December, the true mystery in Carancas is how any of this 
>> happened in
>> the first place.
>>
>> Sophisticated theory and conventional wisdom have long agreed that most 
>> meteors
>> break into fragments and fizzle out before they can reach the Earth's 
>> surface.
>> Even those large and durable enough to make it through the atmosphere hit 
>> the
>> ground as ghosts of their former selves, "plopping out of the sky and 
>> forming a
>> bullet hole in the Earth," Schultz said. "This meteor crashed into the 
>> Earth at
>> three kilometers per second, exploded and buried itself into the ground."
>>
>> Last month, Schultz delivered a highly anticipated lecture at the 39th 
>> Lunar and
>> Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas. And if he's right, 
>> the bold
>> theory he proposed there may shake loose a "gut response" entrenched 
>> within the
>> geological, physical and astronomical sciences: "Carancas simply should 
>> not have
>> happened."
>>
>>
>>
>> A Web of speculation
>>
>> The handful of shepherds who happened to lead their Alpaca herds near the 
>> arroyo
>> that day may have been the first humans ever to witness an explosive 
>> meteor
>> impact. But the rest of the world quickly got its chance, if vicariously,
>> through a flurry of activity in the blogosphere.
>>
>> Hundreds of scientists, journalists and captivated amateurs weighed in on 
>> the
>> bizarre events as they unfolded, offering scores of pet theories and 
>> radically
>> revising them as more information streamed in from Peru.
>>
>> Pravda, a Russian online newspaper born out of a print version run by the
>> country's former Communist Party, ran the headline "American spy 
>> satellite
>> downed in Peru as U.S. nuclear attack on Iran thwarted" five days after 
>> the
>> impact. The story attributes the villagers' illness to radiation 
>> poisoning from
>> the satellite's plutonium power generator.
>>
>> Other proposed explanations were less sensational. Nevadan wildlife 
>> biologist
>> and amateur geologist David Syzdek wrote a Sept. 18 blog post titled 
>> "Meteorite
>> strike in Peru gassing villagers? Maybe not." In it, he proposed that a 
>> mud
>> volcano producing toxic gases was responsible for both the illness and 
>> the
>> crater.
>>
>> "The Andes are very active geologically so I think there is a good 
>> possibility
>> that this crater was caused by an outburst of geothermal activity," he 
>> wrote.
>>
>> As for the blinding light shooting across the sky, Syzdek chalked it up 
>> to
>> coincidence.
>>
>> "Fireballs are quite common," he wrote. "One possible scenario is that 
>> the
>> people who saw the fireball just happened on a recently formed mud 
>> volcano while
>> they were out looking for the fireball impact site."
>>
>> Though Pravda and Syzdek drew radically different conclusions from the 
>> reports,
>> what they shared with each other, many bloggers and even some scientists 
>> was a
>> healthy skepticism about reports coming out of Peru. Pravda and Syzdek 
>> both
>> pointed out in their posts that an explosion powerful enough to create 
>> such a
>> large crater would be equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT, or a tactical 
>> nuclear
>> strike.
>>
>> "When I first saw the news reports, they just didn't seem right," Syzdek 
>> later
>> said in an interview. "Explosive impacts like this just don't happen."
>>
>>
>>
>> 'A hyperspeed curveball'
>>
>> Gonzalo Tancredi, a Uruguayan astronomer who collaborated with Schultz in
>> Carancas, said initial reports of the impact confounded amateurs and 
>> Ph.D.s
>> alike. Bewildered scientists even entertained the possibility of a hoax 
>> as
>> rumors floated around the scientific community.
>>
>> "At the beginning, there were some doubts about what really happened 
>> there,"
>> Tancredi said. "We thought maybe it was a meteor fall or maybe it was 
>> something
>> else, even something fake."
>>
>> But when Tancredi visited Carancas a few weeks later, what he observed 
>> silenced
>> the conspiracies and pointed unequivocally to one conclusion.
>>
>> Tancredi interviewed locals, who reported a large mushroom cloud that 
>> formed
>> over the crater and compression waves that knocked villagers to the 
>> ground. He
>> also found pieces of soil and rock that had been launched over three 
>> football
>> fields from the crater - one piece even pierced the roof of a barn 100 
>> meters
>> away. Combined with analyses of infrasound detectors and the patterns of 
>> crater
>> "ejecta," the evidence pointed to a genuine and very powerful meteorite 
>> impact.
>>
>> But the question that remained on everyone's mind was how the meteor got 
>> there
>> at all - a scientific riddle that was made even more challenging by 
>> Michael
>> Farmer.
>>
>> Farmer is a controversial figure in the geological community. He is a 
>> meteorite
>> hunter, a poacher of alien rocks who travels to impact sites around the 
>> world -
>> usually the "bullet hole in the Earth" type mentioned by Schultz - and 
>> collects
>> whatever he can find, often brushing up against authorities and other 
>> hunters.
>> Meteorite hunting is Farmer's full-time job; he profits from selling what 
>> he
>> finds.
>>
>> Farmer, who said he is "totally self-taught" when it comes to meteors, 
>> said he
>> was as skeptical as the rest when he first heard the reports coming out 
>> of Peru
>> while on hunt in Spain. But 16 days later, he and his partners found 
>> themselves
>> staring into the Carancas impact crater, the first Americans on the 
>> scene - and
>> they stumbled on an extraterrestrial gold mine.
>>
>> "We got there and just started picking up pieces off the ground," Farmer 
>> said.
>> "The entire ground was white, just white powder which was all meteor."
>>
>> Farmer and his team eventually accumulated 10 kilograms of small 
>> meteorite
>> fragments and sold them to private collectors and universities for an
>> astronomical $100 per gram.
>>
>> But despite his rocky past with the geological community, Farmer and his
>> expensive fragments made a priceless contribution to scientists. Within 
>> minutes
>> of arriving on the scene, Farmer discovered that the Carancas meteorite 
>> was a
>> chondrite, or stony meteorite, as opposed to an iron meteorite.
>>
>> Though far more common than iron meteorites, chondrites are highly 
>> vulnerable to
>> ablation - the cracking, eroding and even exploding that occurs when a 
>> meteor
>> enters the atmosphere and undergoes extreme changes in temperature and 
>> pressure.
>> As a result, chondrites are far less likely than the more durable iron
>> meteorites to make it to the Earth's surface in large pieces - which 
>> makes the
>> Carancas meteorite all the more baffling.
>>
>> "For a while, the only information we were getting was from Farmer's Web 
>> site,"
>> Schultz said. "This was not the type of object you'd expect to get 
>> through the
>> atmosphere in a tight clump."
>>
>> With most pieces of the geological puzzle on the table, the stage was set 
>> for
>> Schultz to visit the site for himself. But when he arrived there in 
>> December
>> with a Brown graduate student, Tancredi and Peruvian astrophysicist Jose
>> Ishitsuka, a budding geologist actually made the crucial discovery. Scott 
>> Harris
>> GS said he collected some soil samples "initially out of curiosity" to 
>> look for
>> evidence of shock deformation, which occurs when an object rapidly 
>> decelerates
>> in cases like impacts or explosions. When Harris looked at the material 
>> under a
>> microscope, he found tiny mineral grains that had turned into glass 
>> because of
>> heat and massive shock forces, indicating a very high-speed impact. Here 
>> was yet
>> another mystifying piece of evidence.
>>
>> "At the minimum," Harris said, "this would support a velocity of three
>> kilometers per second - a real high-velocity explosion instead of just a 
>> plop in
>> the ground."
>>
>> By this time, more reputable scientific theories of the impact had 
>> supplanted
>> the initial speculation, the most popular of which came from a group in 
>> Germany
>> and Russia. They proposed that the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere 
>> at a
>> very shallow angle, allowing it to reach the surface gradually and avoid 
>> a
>> sudden increase in pressure - "the difference between diving in and doing 
>> a
>> belly flop," Schultz said.
>>
>> But their theory's relatively low impact velocity of 180 meters per 
>> second, or
>> about 400 miles per hour, was consistent with every piece of evidence but
>> Harris', which pointed to a velocity of about 10,000 miles per hour at 
>> impact.
>>
>> "This was nature's way of throwing us a curveball," Schultz said. "A 
>> hyperspeed
>> curveball."
>>
>>
>>
>> Changing shape, changing theory
>>
>> Back home in Providence, Schultz was now faced with the task of fitting 
>> the
>> puzzle pieces together into a cohesive theory. And to do it, he looked to
>> Earth's closest planetary neighbor, Venus.
>>
>> "Our models make predictions about what kind of objects can make it to 
>> the
>> surface at what velocity, and the Carancas meteor isn't usually one of 
>> them,"
>> Schultz said. "But Venus has a much denser atmosphere and we still find 
>> craters
>> on its surface. How did they get there? I think it might be the same 
>> thing
>> here."
>>
>> To explain the alternative theory he developed, Schultz compared a 
>> typical
>> meteor's descent to a waterskier behind a boat.
>>
>> "Normally when you're on the outside of the wake, you're pushed out 
>> further,"
>> Schultz said. "From my experience looking at Venus, I realized that there 
>> was a
>> certain condition where the waterskier will stay inside the wake, and 
>> actually
>> get pushed inward."
>>
>> At last month's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Schultz proposed 
>> that
>> the meteor did break up into pieces, but shock waves created by the 
>> speeding
>> mass may have kept them close together. And since the meteor descended as 
>> a
>> clump of fragments instead of one large piece, it reshaped itself along 
>> the way
>> to become more aerodynamic, like a football or a javelin cutting through 
>> the air
>> instead of a poorly shaped hunk of rock.
>>
>> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said, 
>> adding
>> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands 
>> and
>> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that 
>> mound
>> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
>> friction."
>>
>> Tancredi, who co-authored the paper with Schultz, Harris and Ishitsuka, 
>> said
>> Schultz's theory is gaining popularity but is still being debated, even 
>> among
>> the group that proposed it.
>>
>> "This is the hot question right now," he said. "We still have to 
>> demonstrate
>> that this phenomenon is possible."
>>
>> In the meantime, another hot question had remained without a definitive 
>> answer -
>> the etiology of the strange illness that afflicted the people of 
>> Carancas. But
>> the group may solve that mystery, too.
>>
>> Schultz, Harris and Tancredi all dismissed the possibility of the 
>> meteorite
>> emitting harmful gases that would sicken villagers. Instead, they 
>> proposed a
>> simpler cause: the power of the mind.
>>
>> The meteorite impact sent out a powerful compression wave that knocked 
>> nearby
>> villagers and animals to the ground and injected the soil with air, which 
>> later
>> bubbled up through the crater. Shepherds and cattle may also have 
>> breathed in
>> the thick dust thrown up by the crash and smelled the sulfurous gases 
>> produced
>> as water reacted with iron sulfide in the meteor.
>>
>> But what the group thinks later spread through the town was not disease, 
>> but
>> panic.
>>
>> "We think it was probably more of a psychological response," Harris said, 
>> adding
>> that commonplace symptoms like headaches and nausea could easily have 
>> been
>> caused by the disorienting impact and then mirrored by frightened 
>> villagers.
>>
>> Harris also admitted the possibility of the meteorite releasing arsenic
>> deposits, which are known to exist in Peru, but said it would be very 
>> unlikely
>> for those gases to have caused the illness.
>>
>> "In order to really get arsenic poisoning, you'd need high 
>> concentrations," he
>> said. "You'd have to be there inhaling the vapor filled with the stuff 
>> right
>> after the meteorite hit."
>>
>> Poisonous or not, the Carancas meteorite could have important 
>> implications for
>> public safety. Tancredi said there's no reason an impact like this 
>> couldn't
>> happen in a major city, wiping out a few city blocks. He also pointed out 
>> that
>> today's most advanced meteor detectors aren't nearly powerful enough to 
>> detect
>> an object as small as the Carancas meteorite.
>>
>> "Near-Earth detectors detect objects that could create a global 
>> catastrophe,
>> something maybe a kilometer across," he said. "We don't have any kind of
>> technology that could detect this object before reaching the atmosphere, 
>> so it
>> will not be possible to know when and where one of these objects could 
>> strike
>> again."
>>
>> But Schultz said the most important lesson to learn from Carancas is that 
>> the
>> foundation of good science is hard empirical evidence, even - and 
>> especially -
>> when it contradicts established principle.
>>
>> "We tried to understand what the rocks told us rather than looking at the
>> theory," he said. "Nature trumps theory, every time."
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