Space Nomads: Meteorites in Sky, Field, and LaboratoryLaPaz, Lincoln
Science
Space Nomads: Meteorites in Sky, Field, and Laboratory
LaPaz, Lincoln
Meteorites
On March 24, a field party left the University of New Mexico to make a
survey of this area. Unfortunately, Kansas blizzards can be as severe as
any in Siberia, and although the scientists gathered many helpful
reports from eyewitnesses of the fall, heavy snow and high winds
seriously hampered the work. The information they collected, however,
confirmed the accuracy of the Institute staff’s first determination of
the probable area of fall.
Late in the spring, a farmer in this area found a “strange stone” on his
land and held it for identification by the second Institute party. This
strange stone—which smelled like sulfur and had metallic specks in
it—was the first piece of the fallen meteorite to be recovered.
Scientists and farmers soon found many other fragments during systematic
searches of the rolling farm and pasture lands. The fourteen-year-old
boy who had been walking with his mother at the time of the fall
discovered a 130-pound fragment of the meteorite in a pasture that had
already been carefully searched by grown-up meteorite hunters! This find
was one of the two largest fragments recovered from the entire fall. The
landing place of this large piece was marked only by a small hole in the
sod, but, on prodding into this hole, the boy struck something rather
solid. He ran at once to tell the lady who owned the pastureland, and
together they dug out the fine meteorite.
[Illustration: The Furnas County, Nebraska, stony meteorite in place
at the bottom of its 10-foot “penetration funnel.”]
This discovery brought interest in finding meteorites to a fever pitch,
and it was soon possible to look in almost any direction and see
farmers, or their wives and children, walking slowly across the fields
and looking for meteorites.
Finally, in August, two farmers cutting wheat in a field just a short
distance north of the Kansas-Nebraska state line found a deep hole when
their tractor almost fell into it. They investigated and discovered that
a very large fragment of the meteorite had buried itself deep in the
ground.
Scientists from the University of Nebraska and the Institute of
Meteoritics carefully excavated this huge meteorite. They found that the
mass had plunged more than 10 feet into the earth. Quite by chance, its
lower surface had come to rest in the ashes of a long-buried primitive
cooking site.
The excavated meteorite looked and felt like a huge stone. Actually, it
was stony in nature, but of a texture so fragile that it had to be
wrapped in tissue paper, then in burlap, and finally covered with a
thick coating of plaster of Paris before it could be lifted out of the
ground. Those in charge of the removal of the meteorite borrowed this
procedure from the paleontologists, who use it in the removal of fossil
tusks and bones that otherwise would crumble away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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