[meteorite-list] Meteor Streaks Over Pacific Northwest

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.geotimes.org/feb08/article.html?id=WebExtra022008.html  

Meteor shocks Pacific Northwest
Megan Sever
GeoTimes
February 20, 2008

At about 5:31 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, a bright, flaming fireball
streaked across the pre-dawn sky in the Pacific Northwest near Portland,
Ore., and exploded with a large blast that lit up the horizon, witnesses
say. Security cameras at a Portland hospital captured the fireball's
arrival on film, and dozens of reports of eyewitness sightings came in
from across Washington and Oregon and even as far away as Idaho and
British Columbia. No one has found pieces of the meteorite yet or any
craters, but researchers are on the lookout, and suggest that anyone who
finds any evidence of it should call the experts.

"The fireball came in over western Washington, going east-southeast,
and exploded somewhere around Pendleton, Ore.," in the northeastern part
of the state, says Dick Pugh of Portland State University's Cascadia
Meteorite Laboratory. "It was exceedingly bright in Pendleton -
bright enough to wake people up," he says. People from Pendleton to
Hermiston, Ore., say that they heard a sonic boom - "loud enough to
rattle windows and send dogs running under beds." The sonic booms - in
addition to the crackling and popping noises, called "electrophonic
sounds," that followed - indicate that at least a portion of the meteor
survived entry into Earth's atmosphere and struck the ground, he says.

Geologists at Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory say that they have received
calls from people in three separate locations in Oregon who said they
saw pieces of the meteorite strike the ground, but they haven't
confirmed the findings yet. "We can hope for holes in barn roofs," Pugh
says, as that would make any fragments easier to find. But more likely
the meteorite fragments are scattered among eastern Oregon's wheatfields
or in the Blue Mountains, which he says would make them exceedingly
difficult to locate. "We aren't going to go out and wander the
wheatfields," he says, but they are still pondering a visit to Pendleton
to show locals what to be looking for as they walk their own land. "The
recovery rate on fireballs is about 1 percent," he adds, "so the odds
aren't good.' And even if they were to find anything, he says, "I would
expect any fragments to be from marble-sized to maybe the size of a
basketball," and no large craters.

Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere before striking Earth, so for
this one to get as close as it did - and maybe hit the planet, thus
becoming a "meteorite" - means it was once a very big piece of rock,
says Scott Burns, a geologist at Portland State. "It's very exciting,"
he says.

Four meteorites have been recovered in Oregon, including one recovered
in Oregon City in 1902 that weighs 15 tons. Fireballs - defined as
meteors that are brighter than Venus - are far more common, however. "We
get several a year here in the Pacific Northwest, but most of the time
it's too cloudy to see them," Pugh says. The last one was seen on Dec.
24, 2007, but the last meteorite to be recovered in Oregon was in 1981,
he says, and that's only because it hit a house.