MARMET- METEORITES

I will be at the ENSISHEIM METEORITE (France)
Friday to Sunday, June 20-22, 2008!

1969 - what a year!

- On February 8, 1969, the Allende meteorite fell at 1:05am in Pueblito de Allende, Chihuahua State, Mexico. It is a rare carbonaceous chondrite CV3.

- On July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.

- On September 28, 1969, the Murchison meteorite fall occurred over Murchison, Australia. Classified as a carbonaceous chondrite CM2, this meteorite is of possible cometary origin. More than 92 different amino acids have been identified within the Murchison meteorite to date, only nineteen of these are found on Earth...

But that‘s not all!

- On April 25, 1969, at 9:22pm a fireball was observed travelling southeast to northwest over the British Isles alighting in Northern Ireland where one stone of 513 grams fell through a roof in Sprucefield, County Antrim, and broke in two. A second stone fell 60km away on a farm in Bovedy, it weighs 4.95 kilos.

The fireball was described by numerous observers as blue-green to fiery-white in colour with a brightness at least equal to the full moon. The bigger mass gave the meteorite its name: BOVEDY. It is a rather rare unequilibrated L3 chondrite showing stunning chondrules.

In addition, a lady was outdoors with her tape machine recording bird songs (of a song thrush [Turdus philomelos]) when the meteorite passed over and she caught the sounds of the detonations. The booms and rumblings echo around for several seconds after the first detonation, and a frightened dog starts to bark soon after.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only documented case where audible sounds were recorded during a meteor entry. The ground area where the tape recording was made was some 30 km away from an area where meteorites were subsequently recovered. To listen to this unique document, please click here:

One of the most famous meteorites in the world is without doubt the Krasnojarsk pallasite from Yeniseisk, Russia (Synonyms: Krasnoyarsk, Medvedeva, Medwedewa, Pallas Iron,...).

A mass of about 700 kg was discovered in 1749 on the side of Mount Bolshoi Imir, about 200 km southeast of Krasnojarsk. A local man, Yakov Medvedev, was searching for ore veins and likely found the mysterious iron boulder lying in the open air with no sign of an impact crater.

22 years after Medvedev's find a German copper miner named Johann Kaspar Mettich, who had come to work in Russia, wrote a report to Peter Simon Pallas, saying that he had noticed an iron boulder lying in the open, previously discovered by a Cossack named Medvedev. He added the iron was discovered in 1749 and subsequently used by the local population as a "raw iron" source. The Berlin born Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), a renowned scientist, academician, naturalist, and traveler who spent more than 40 years of his life in Russia examined the mass that the local taiga tribes said it had fallen from the Heavens.

The huge iron which was partly covered with a black crust with many translucent olivine crystals - that Pallas had never seen nor heard about - caught the scientist's attention. He described the find as an iron mass 'having cavities filled with small olivine crystals'. Pallas recognized and registered the importance of the iron mass and organized the transportation to St. Petersburg. He thoroughly described the unusual find in one of his reports, not knowing that it was a genuine rock from space.

Some decades later analysis of the metal showed that it was a new type of meteorite: a stony-iron, a group later called "Pallasites" after Pallas, whereas the meteorite itself is today named Krasnojarsk or sometimes also called Pallas Iron, the name given to it by Ernst Florens Chladni in 1794.

Chladni was encouraged by Pallas' report to publish his audacious thesis that this and other finds actually represent genuine rocks from space.

Above left: This beautiful fresco named "Adoration of the Magi" on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, completed by the great Florentine Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) has always been regarded as the Halley's comet in its 1301 appearance, which inspired Giotto for his painting.

But the Star of Bethlehem was probably not a comet, because at that time there was no comet to see, as far as we know today. It is said that Herod secretly called the wise men, and learned from them what time the star appeared. Why did Herod had to ask? A comet could have be seen for several days...so the Star of Bethlehem was maybe a meteorite...and 1965 years later another Christmas Star fell, this time in England:-)...

The Barwell meteorite is very well documented (The pictures above are from the book: Comets, Meteorites and Men by Peter Lancaster Brown, 1973). Furthermore the whole story is published very much in detail in the MINERALOGICAL MAGAZINE, Vol. 35, September 1966, No. 275 by E. A. Jobbins and F. G. Dimes (see link below). The 5.17 gram piece (top right) was part of a bigger mass that had been found near the center of Barwell (see map below), embedded in short turf. The pieces totaling 113.6 g (above right and below right) were no. MI 32885 and part of the collection of the Institute of Geological Sciences in London and - according to the label - moved later to the Natural History Museum.

On Christmas Eve 1965, what may have been mistaken for the bright star in the east, was in fact a fireball sweeping across England, announcing the arrival of what was to become Britain's largest meteorite.
The sight of this flaming fireball was followed by a sonic boom, a tremendous bang, a roaring noise as the rock exploded into thousands of pieces of what became known as the Christmas meteorite.
From fragments to large chunks Barwell became the target, yet amazingly no-one was injured.
Had the meteorite landed elsewhere, it could easily have been a different story.
Some fragments even penetrated 20 cm into a tarmac drive, landed on the hood of a car or smashed through a factory roof. One tiny piece was even found later in a vase or - according to other sources - in a tea-pot...

The red arrow shows where the above 5.17 gram part fragment was found. A lot of pieces had been found right after the fall. In early February an attempt was made to fit the found fragments together in order to find out the original form of the meteorite. Only two large fragments, which fell 3/8 miles apart, fitted exactly together. This was a hint that a lot more could be found, but no significant finds had taken place during the first three weeks of February. So it was decided to offer to purchase any additional fragments found. Two days after the local newspaper publicized this offer, a 2. 3 kg piece and two days later even a 7.7 kilo meteorite was found (no. 18 on the map), the biggest piece, beautifully crusted and with wonderful regmaglypts! Here is the link to whole article:

About the Kandahar (Afghanistan) meteorite: Dr. J. Geiss from Bern wrote a letter to E. L. Krinov, dated July 22, 1960. Dr. Geiss was able to get the meteorite out of Afghanistan with the help of a member of the diplomatic corps (Prof. O. Eugster pers. commun. to J. Nauber). Fresh meteorites were extremely rare at that time and Mr. Geiss was very keen to get a piece for scientific studies. Unfortunately the TKW (Total Known Weight) was very low and to date, all known fragments together are only a mere 525 grams. The 3.3 g part slice above comes from a Swiss museum and was cut off the BE-71-4 mass.

The picture above shows a non-metallic shale slab that was removed and collected from the Hoba mass by Dr. L. J. Spencer, F. R. S., Keeper of Minerals at the British Museum in London (now the Natural History Museum) in 1929.

In the same year a group of German geologists visited the Hoba fall site (see picture below) before they went to South Africa to attend an International Conference of Geologists*. It's very likely that Dr. Spencer and his team did the same.

(*source: Natur und Museum, Heft 10, 1931, H. Schneiderhöhn: Der Riesenmeteorit von Hoba-West im Otavibergland, Südwestafrika)

On the above label the Fourth Academy-Vaux expedition is mentioned. Samuel G. Gorden travelled a lot to get new pieces for the famous Vaux mineral collection of the Academy. On this fourth expedition he also visited the Hoba (Grootfontein) fall site.

Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, June 5th, 1930:

"A stated meeting of the Philadelphia Mineralogical Society was held on the above date.(...) Mr. Samuel G. Gordon, the speaker of the evening, described briefly the Fourth Academy-Vaux expedition. Arriving at Mollendo, Peru, he crossed into Bolivia where considerable time was spent in collecting, then across Argentina to Buenos Aires and via steamer to Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. His route now crossed what was formerly German Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, Union of South Africa, Belgian Congo and Tanganyika. From Daressalaam on the Indian Ocean, he emparked on a steamer for Marseilles, visiting Paris, London and other European cities before sailing for New York.

(...)

At Grootfontein he visited the largest known meteorite about which a trench has been dug and which permits a close inspection of this immense mass of metal." (From: The American Mineralogist)

About the Hoba meteorite: The Hoba meteorite is the heaviest meteorite in the world. The meteorite, named after the Hoba West Farm near Grootfontein, Namibia, where it was discovered in 1920, has not been moved since it landed over about 80.000 years ago. The shape of the meteorite is quite unusual: It is flat on both major surfaces.

The Hoba meteorite is a body of metal, measuring 2.7 by 2.7 meters by 0.9 meters. Its mass in 1920 was estimated at 66 tons. In March 1955 the Government of Namibia (then South West Africa) declared the Hoba meteorite a National Monument.

The Hoba meteorite was discovered by the owner of the Hoba West farm. He is said to have encountered the giant meteorite while ploughing one of his fields with an ox. During this task, the farmer heard a loud, metallic, scratching sound before his plough came to a dead stop. The farmer uncovered the meteorite soon after.

Hoba Meteorite

This meteorite - the world‘s biggest known single mass - was discovered in 1920 by Jacobus Hermanus Brits.

On March 15, 1955 the meteorite was declared a national monument with permission of Mrs. O. Scheel who was the owner of the farm at that time.

In 1979, the above declaration was also accepted by the successor on the farm, Mr. J. Jooste.

The current farm owner, Mr. J. Engelbrecht, has donated the terrain around the meteorite and thus made it possible to beautify the aera (1987).

Only a few meteorites had been found by field parties in Antarctica between 1912 and 1964. Then in 1969, the 10th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition found nine meteorites on a blue ice field near the Yamato Mountains. Their analyses showed that these nine meteorites were not fragments of one single meteorite fall but samples of four different stony meteorites.With this discovery, came the realization that movement of ice sheets might act to concentrate meteorites in certain areas. In 1974, a Japanese expedition was launched to search for meteorites. Shortly thereafter, the United States began its own program to search for Antarctic meteorites, the ANtarctic Search for METeorites (ANSMET) program.

The third U. S.-Japan joint program entitled "Antarctic search for meteorites" (ANSMET) was carried out during the 1978-1979 field season. Three Japanese and four U. S. scientists collaborated in the search for meteorites and found 311 specimens.

Several treaties prevent a trade of nearly all of the Antarctic meteorites, yet a handful of material made it to the collectors market prior to these treaties. The three Antarctic meteorites shown here are Pre-Treaty meteorites!

One of the US scientist of the 1978/79 ANSMET team was Dr. Ursula B. Marvin who wrote a letter to Dr. Edward Olsen from the Field Museum in Chicago (see picture below). Dr. Ursula B. Marvin is a senior geologist emerita of geology and historian of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Between 1978 and 1985, she spent three field seasons in Antarctica. Asteroid Marvin was named for her in 1991 by the Minor Planet Bureau of the International Astronomical Union, and Marvin Nunatak, a mountain peak in Antarctica, was named in her honor in 1992.

The Lazarev meteorite was found on January 21, 1961 by geologists Prof. M.G. Ravich and B.I. Revnov, participants of the 6th Soviet Antarctic expedition, during a geological study of the southern ridges of the Humboldt Mountains in the central part of Queen Maude Land at an altitude of 3000 m above sea level. The meteorite (2 pieces weighing 8 kg and 2 kg) was in a small foothold covered by chips of sandstone. Lazarev was the first find of an iron meteorite in Antarctica.

The Allende meteorite - Chihuahua district, Mexico - fell on February 8, 1969 after a bright bolide was seen in the very early morning hours. It turned out to belong to the relatively rare class of meteorites - the carbonaceous chondrites - and was found in a strewn field estimated to cover over 250 km2. The ellipse was 50 km long and 12 km wide. More than two metric tons of the meteorite have been collected in hundreds of fragments, the largest of which had a mass of about 110 kg but unfortunately broke up on impact.

The Allende meteorite fell just a few months before the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the Moon, providing a unique opportunity for scientists to test many of the analytical techniques that they had developed to study the lunar samples.

Allende is a rare type of meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite, so called because it is rich in carbon. Allende contains CAIs, calcium-aluminum inclusions (a), predominantly white to light gray in color, irregularly shaped, and rich in refractory (high-temperature) minerals and they are thought to have formed at the very beginning of the solar system about 4567 million years ago. In addition, Allende has many well defined, more or less spheroidal chondrules. Both, the chondrules and the CAIs formed during rapid heating events at the dawn of the solar system. Numerous analyses indicate that CAIs formed about two million years earlier than chondrules. Relict pieces of CAIs have even been found inside chondrules, and so must have formed earlier. However, rather strange is the fact, that two Japanese scientists of the Tokyo Institute of Technology found a chondrule inside a CAI, which strongly indicates that some chondrules must have formed before CAIs...

(b) shows a orthopyroxene rich chondrule, (c) might be a CM inclusion, (d) a melilite-fassaite-anorthite chondrule.

The 20.6 g end piece of the Bondoc meteorite in my collection has a small number, painted with white ink (by H.H. Nininger?): (2)684.255.

This is the incredible story of the recovery of the Bondoc meteorite. One of the largest, finest and most unusual stony meteorites yet discovered came from the Bondoc peninsula of Luzon in the Philippine Islands only because of coincidental events and the persistance of Dr. H. H. Nininger and Mr. John Lednicky, two ingenious Americans.

From: H. H. Nininger, Find a Falling Star, p. 225ff (summarized and abridged):

We had been in the Philippines ten or twelve days in 1959 when I visited the office of the National Bureau of Mines, sure that among thousands of samples that inevitably reach such an office, there must be an occasional meteorite.

"Well, yes, once in a while such a sample comes in; but who cares about meteorites?" I had the answer.

Might not the Bureau have such specimens on hand? Well, the director thought, there should be one. It had come in not so long ago, a rounded, rusty lump of what appeared to be nickel-iron, very badly weathered. The official assured me the Bureau had no interest in the specimen and that I was free to pursue the matter.

A pair of lawyers had contacted two Japanese geologists who desired an iron mine, but when these two were escorted to inspect the prospect they were disappointed: This was no iron outcorp, but only something that had fallen from the heavens, and they turned away. To reach that remote jungle location they had to spend several hours aboard a slow train, then they waited for a bus that only runs when the weather and the roads are not too bad. It normally takes one day to reach a costal village. From there a small boat carried them to and into the mouth of a river. Then they had tramped for ten hours through crocodile and serpent-infested jungle only to find a lone metallic lump which they judged to be of low-grade quality.

Ten years earlier a visitor from Manila to our museum on Highway 66 had shown keen interest in meteorites. He was John A. Lednicky, a University of Kansas graduate who had lived in Manila most of his life. He said that if and when I needed assistance he