English

Noun

meteorites

1. Plural of meteorite

A meteorite is a natural object originating in outer space that survives an impact with the Earth's surface. While in space it is called a meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere, air resistance causes the body to heat up and emit light, thus forming a fireball, also known as a meteor or shooting star. The term bolide refers to either an extraterrestrial body that collides with the Earth, or to an exceptionally bright, fireball-like meteor regardless of whether it ultimately impacts the surface.

More generally, a meteorite on the surface of any celestial body is a natural object that has come from elsewhere in space. Meteorites have been found on the Moon and Mars.

Meteorites that are recovered after being observed as they transited the atmosphere or impacted the Earth are called falls. All other meteorites are known as finds. As of mid-2006, there are approximately 1,050 witnessed falls having specimens in the world's collections. In contrast, there are over 31,000 well-documented meteorite finds.

Meteorites are always named for the place where they were found, usually a nearby town or geographic feature. In cases where many meteorites were found in one place, the name may be followed by a number or letter (e.g., Allan Hills 84001 or Dimmitt (b)). Some meteorites have informal nicknames: the Sylacauga meteorite is sometimes called the "Hodges meteorite" after Ann Hodges, the woman who was struck by it; the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which formed Meteor Crater has dozens of these aliases. However, the single, official name designated by the Meteoritical Society is used by scientists, catalogers, and most collectors.

Meteorites have traditionally been divided into three broad categories: stony meteorites are rocks, mainly composed of silicate minerals; iron meteorites are largely composed of metallic iron-nickel; and, stony-iron meteorites contain large amounts of both metallic and rocky material. Modern classification schemes divide meteorites into groups according to their structure, chemical and isotopic composition and mineralogy. See Meteorites classification.

Fall phenomena

Most meteoroids disintegrate when entering the Earth's atmosphere. However, an estimated 500 meteorites ranging in size from marbles to basketballs or larger do reach the surface each year; only 5 or 6 of these are typically recovered and made known to scientists. Few meteorites are large enough to create large impact craters. Instead, they typically arrive at the surface at their terminal velocity and, at most, create a small pit. Even so, falling meteorites have reportedly caused damage to property, livestock and people.

Very large meteoroids may strike the ground with a significant fraction of their cosmic velocity, leaving behind a hypervelocity impact crater. The kind of crater will depend on the size, composition, degree of fragmentation, and incoming angle of the impactor. The force of such collisions has the potential to cause widespread destruction. The most frequent hypervelocity cratering events on the Earth are caused by iron meteoroids, which are most easily able to transit the atmosphere intact. Examples of craters caused by iron meteoroids include Barringer Meteor Crater, Odessa Meteor Crater, Wabar craters, and Wolfe Creek crater; iron meteorites are found in association with all of these craters. In contrast, even relatively large stony or icy bodies like small comets or asteroids, up to millions of tons, are disrupted in the atmosphere, and do not make impact craters. Although such disruption events are uncommon, they can cause a considerable concussion to occur; the famed Tunguska event probably resulted from such an incident. Very large stony objects, hundreds of meters in diameter or more, weighing tens-of-millions of tons or more, can reach the surface and cause large craters, but are very rare. Such events are generally so energetic that the impactor is completely destroyed, leaving no meteorites. (The very first example of a stony meteorite found in association with a large impact crater, the Morokweng crater in South Africa, was reported in May 2006.)

Several phenomena are well-documented during witnessed meteorite falls too small to produce hypervelocity craters. The fireball that occurs as the meteoroid passes through the atmosphere can appear to be very bright, rivaling the sun in intensity, although most are far dimmer and may not even be noticed during daytime. Various colors have been reported, including yellow, green and red. Flashes and bursts of light can occur as the object breaks up. Explosions, detonations, and rumblings are often heard during meteorite falls, which can be caused by sonic booms as well as shock waves resulting from major fragmentation events. These sounds can be heard over wide areas, up to many thousands of square km. Whistling and hissing sounds are also sometimes heard, but are poorly understood. Following passage of the fireball, it is not unusual for a dust trail to linger in the atmosphere for some time.

As meteoroids are heated during passage through the atmosphere, their surfaces melt and experience ablation. They can be sculpted into various shapes during this process, sometimes resulting in deep "thumb-print" like indentations on their surfaces called regmaglypts. If the meteoroid maintains a fixed orientation for some time, without tumbling, it may develop a conical "nose cone" or "heat shield" shape. As it decelerates, eventually the molten surface layer solidifies into a thin fusion crust, which on most meteorites is black (on some achondrites, the fusion crust may be very light colored). On stony meteorites, the heat-affected zone is at most a few mm deep; in iron meteorites, which are more thermally conductive, the structure of the metal may be affected by heat up to 1 cm below the surface. Meteorites are sometimes reported to be warm to the touch when they land, but they are never hot. Reports, however, vary greatly, with some meteorites being reported as "burning hot to the touch" upon landing, and others forming a frost upon their surface.

Meteoroids that experience disruption in the atmosphere may fall as meteorite showers, which can range from only a few up to thousands of separate individuals. The area over which a meteorite shower falls is known as its strewn field. Strewn fields are commonly elliptical in shape, with the major axis parallel to the direction of flight. In most cases, the largest meteorites in a shower are found farthest down-range in the strewn field.

Meteorite types

About 86% of the meteorites that fall on Earth are chondrites, which are named for the small, round particles they contain. These particles, or chondrules, are composed mostly of silicate minerals that appear to have been melted while they were free-floating objects in space. Chondrites also contain small amounts of organic matter, including amino acids, and presolar grains. Chondrites are typically about 4.55 billion years old and are thought to represent material from the asteroid belt that never formed into large bodies. Like comets, chondritic asteroids are some of the oldest and most primitive materials in the solar system. Chondrites are often considered to be "the building blocks of the planets".

About 8% of the meteorites that fall on Earth are achondrites, some of which appear to be similar to terrestrial mafic igneous rocks. Most achondrites are also ancient rocks, and are thought to represent crustal material of asteroids. One large family of achondrites (the HED meteorites) may have originated on the asteroid 4 Vesta. Others derive from different asteroids. Two small groups of achondrites are special, as they are younger and do not appear to come from the asteroid belt. One of these groups comes from the Moon, and includes rocks similar to those brought back to Earth by Apollo and Luna programs. The other group is almost certainly from Mars and are the only materials from other planets ever recovered by man.

About 5% of meteorites that fall are iron meteorites with intergrowths of iron-nickel alloys, such as kamacite and taenite. Most iron meteorites are thought to come from the core of a number of asteroids that were once molten. As on Earth, the denser metal separated from silicate material and sank toward the center of the asteroid, forming a core. After the asteroid solidified, it broke up in a collision with another asteroid. Due to the low abundance of irons in collection areas such as Antarctica, where most of the meteoric material that has fallen can be recovered, it is possible that the actual percentage of iron-meteorite falls is lower than 5%.

Stony-iron meteorites constitute the remaining 1%. They are a mixture of iron-nickel metal and silicate minerals. One type, called pallasites, is thought to have originated in the boundary zone above the core regions where iron meteorites originated. The other major type of stony-iron meteorites is the mesosiderites.

Tektites (from Greek tektos, molten) are not themselves meteorites, but are rather natural glass objects up to a few centimeters in size which were formed--according to most scientists--by the impacts of large meteorites on Earth's surface. A few researchers have favored Tektites originating from the Moon as volcanic ejecta, but this theory has lost much of its support over the last few decades.

Meteorite recovery

Falls

Most meteorite falls are recovered on the basis of eye-witness accounts of the fireball or the actual impact of the object on the ground, or both. Therefore, despite the fact that meteorites actually fall with virtually equal probability everywhere on Earth, verified meteorite falls tend to be concentrated in areas with high human population densities such as Europe, Japan, and northern India.

A small number of meteorite falls have been observed with automated cameras and recovered following calculation of the impact point. The first of these was the Pribram meteorite, which fell in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) in 1959. In this case, two cameras used to photograph meteors captured images of the fireball. The images were used both to determine the location of the stones on the ground and, more significantly, to calculate for the first time an accurate orbit for a recovered meteorite.

Following the Pribram fall, other nations established automated observing programs aimed at studying infalling meteorites. One of these was the Prairie Network, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1963 to 1975 in the midwestern US. This program also observed a meteorite fall, the Lost City chondrite, allowing its recovery and a calculation of its orbit. Another program in Canada, the Meteorite Observation and Recovery Project, ran from 1971 to 1985. It too recovered a single meteorite, Innisfree, in 1977. Finally, observations by the European Fireball Network, a descendant of the original Czech program that recovered Pribram, led to the discovery and orbit calculations for the Neuschwanstein meteorite in 2002.

Finds

Until the 20th century, only a few hundred meteorite finds had ever been discovered. Over 80% of these were iron and stony-iron meteorites, which are easily distinguished from local rocks. To this day, few stony meteorites are reported each year that can be considered to be "accidental" finds. The reason there are now over 30,000 meteorite finds in the world's collections started with the discovery by Harvey H. Nininger that meteorites are much more common on the surface of the Earth than was previously thought.

The Great Plains of the US

Nininger's strategy was to search for meteorites in the Great Plains of the United States, where the land was largely cultivated and the soil contained few rocks. Between the late 1920s and the 1950s, he traveled across the region, educating local people about what meteorites looked like and what to do if they thought they had found one, for example, in the course of clearing a field. The result was the discovery of over 200 new meteorites, mostly stony types.

In the late 1960s, Roosevelt County, New Mexico in the Great Plains was found to be a particularly good place to find meteorites. After the discovery of a few meteorites in 1967, a public awareness campaign resulted in the finding of nearly 100 new specimens in the next few years, with many being found by a single person, Mr. Ivan Wilson. In total, nearly 140 meteorites were found in the region since 1967. In the area of the finds, the ground was originally covered by a shallow, loose soil sitting atop a hardpan layer. During the dustbowl era, the loose soil was blown off, leaving any rocks and meteorites that were present stranded on the exposed surface.

Antarctica

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. With this discovery, came the realization that movement of ice sheets might act to concentrate meteorites in certain areas. After a dozen other specimens were found in the same place in 1973, a Japanese expedition was launched in 1974 dedicated to the search for meteorites. This team recovered nearly 700 meteorites. Shortly thereafter, the United States began its own program to search for Antarctic meteorites, operating along the Transantarctic Mountains on the other side of the continent: the ANtarctic Search for METeorites (ANSMET) program. European teams, starting with a consortium called "EUROMET" in the late 1980s, and continuing with a program by the Italian Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide have also conducted systematic searches for Antarctic meteorites. More recently, a Chinese program, the Antarctic Scientific Exploration of China, has conducted highly successful meteorite searches since the year 2000. A Korean program (KOREAMET) was launched in 2007, and has collected a few meteorites . The combined efforts of all of these expeditions have produced over 23,000 classified meteorite specimens since 1974, with thousands more that have not yet been classified. For more information see the article by Harvey (2003).

Australia

At about the same time as meteorite concentrations were being discovered in the cold desert of Antarctica, collectors discovered that many meteorites could also be found in the hot deserts of Australia. Several dozen meteorites had already been found in the Nullarbor region of Western and South Australia. Systematic searches between about 1971 and the present recovered over 500 more, ~300 of which are currently well characterized. The meteorites can be found in this region because the land presents a flat, featureless, plain covered by limestone. In the extremely arid climate, there has been relatively little weathering or sedimentation on the surface for tens of thousands of years, allowing meteorites to accumulate without being buried or destroyed. The dark colored meteorites can then be recognized among the very different looking limestone pebbles and rocks.

The Sahara and rising commercialization

In 1986-87, a German team installing a network of seismic stations while prospecting for oil discovered about 65 meteorites on a flat, desert plain about 100 km southeast of Dirj (Daraj), Libya. A few years later, a desert enthusiast saw photographs of meteorites being recovered by scientists in Antarctica, and thought that he had seen similar occurrences northern Africa. In 1989, he recovered about 100 meteorites from several distinct locations in Libya and Algeria. Over the next several years, he and others who followed found at least 400 more meteorites. The find locations were generally in regions known as regs or hamadas: flat, featureless areas covered only by small pebbles and minor amounts of sand. Dark-colored meteorites can be easily spotted in these places, where they have also been well-preserved due to the arid climate.

Although meteorites had been sold commercially and collected by hobbyists for many decades, up to the time of the Saharan finds of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most meteorites were deposited in or purchased by museums and similar institutions where they were exhibited and made available for scientific research. The sudden availability of large numbers of meteorites that could be found with relative ease in places that were readily accessible (especially compared to Antarctica), led to a rapid rise in commercial collection of meteorites. This process was accelerated when, in 1997, meteorites coming from both the Moon and Mars were found in Libya. By the late 1990s, private meteorite-collecting expeditions had been launched throughout the Sahara. Specimens of the meteorites recovered in this way are still deposited in research collections, but most of the material is sold to private collectors. These expeditions have now brought the total number of well-described meteorites found in Algeria and Libya to over 2000.

As word spread in Saharan countries about the growing profitibility of the meteorite trade, meteorite markets came into existence, especially in Morocco, fed by nomads and local people who combed the deserts looking for specimens to sell. Many thousands of meteorites have been distributed in this way, most of which lack any information about how, when, or where they were discovered. These are the so-called "Northwest Africa" meteorites.

Oman

In 1999, meteorite hunters discovered that the desert in southern and central Oman were also favorable for the collection of many specimens. The gravel plains in the Dhofar and Al Wusta regions of Oman, south of the sandy deserts of the Rub' al Khali, had yielded about 2,000 meteorites as of mid-2006. Included among these are a large number of lunar and Martian meteorites, making Oman a particularly important area both for scientists and collectors. Early expeditions to Oman were mainly done by commercial meteorite dealers, however international teams of Omani and European scientists have also now collected specimens.

The recovery of meteorites from Oman is currently prohibited by national law, but a number of international hunters continue to remove specimens now deemed "national treasures." This new law provoked a small international incident, as its implementation actually preceded any public notification of such a law, resulting in the prolonged imprisonment of a large group of meteorite hunters primarily from Russia, but whose party also consisted of members from the U.S. as well as several other European countries.

The American Southwest

Beginning in the mid-1990s, amateur meteorite hunters began scouring the arid areas of the southwestern United States. To date, meteorites numbering possibly into the thousands have been recovered from the Mojave, Sonora, Tule, and Lechuguilla Deserts, with many being recovered on dry lake beds (playas). Significant finds include the Superior Valley 014 Acapulcoite, one of two of its type found within the United States as well as the Blue Eagle meteorite, the first Rumuruti-type chondrite yet found in the Americas. Perhaps the most notable find in recent years has been the Los Angeles meteorite, a martian meteorite of unknown origin that was supposedly found somewhere in the Mojave desert. A number of finds from the American Southwest have yet to be formally submitted to the Meteorite Nomenclature Committee, as many finders think it is unwise to publicly state the coordinates of their discoveries for fear of 'poaching' by other hunters. Several of the meteorites found recently are currently on display in the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

Meteorites in history

One of the leading theories for the cause of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event that included the dinosaurs is a large meteorite impact. The Chicxulub Crater has been identified as the site of this impact. There has been a lively scientific debate as to whether other major extinctions, including the ones at the end of the Permian and Triassic periods might also have been the result of large impact events, but the evidence is much less compelling than for the end Cretaceous extinction. Tollmann's hypothetical bolide is one such meteorite that some speculate had a major impact on world wide geology, although there is no direct evidence that any such meteorite ever existed.

A famous case is the alleged Chinguetti meteorite, a find reputed to come from a large unconfirmed 'iron mountain' in Africa.

There are several reported instances of falling meteorites having killed both people and livestock, but a few of these appear more credible than others. The most infamous reported fatality from a meteorite impact is that of an Egyptian dog that was killed in 1911, although this report is highly disputed. This particular meteorite fall was identified in the 1980s as Martian in origin. However, there is substantial evidence that the meteorite known as Valera hit and killed a cow upon impact, nearly dividing the animal in two, and similar unsubstantiated reports of a horse being struck and killed by a stone of the New Concord fall also abound. Throughout history, many first and second-hand reports of meteorites falling on and killing both humans and other animals abound, but none have been well documented.

The first known modern case of a human hit by a space rock occurred on 30 November 1954 in Sylacauga, Alabama. There a 4 kg stone chondrite crashed through a roof and hit Ann Hodges in her living room after it bounced off her radio. She was badly bruised.

Other than the Sylacauga event, the most plausible of these claims was put forth by a young boy who stated that he had been hit by a small (~3 gram) stone of the Mbale meteorite fall from Uganda, and who stood to gain nothing from this assertion. The stone reportedly fell through a number of banana leaves before striking the boy on the head, causing little to no pain, as it was small enough to have been slowed by both friction with the atmosphere as well as that with banana leaves, before striking the boy. Although it is impossible to prove this claim either way, it seems as though he had little reason to lie about such an event occurring.

Several persons have since claimed to have been struck by "meteorites" but no verifiable meteorites have resulted.

Indigenous peoples often prized iron-nickel meteorites as an easy, if limited, source of iron metal. For example, the Inuit used chips of the Cape York meteorite to form cutting edges for tools and spear tips.

Other Native Americans treated meteorites as ceremonial objects. In 1915, a 135-pound iron meteorite was found in a Sinagua (c.1100-1200 AD) burial cyst near Camp Verde, Arizona, respectfully wrapped in a feather cloth. A small pallasite was found in a pottery jar in an old burial found at Pojoaque Pueblo, New Mexico. Nininger reports several other such instances, in the Southwest US and elsewhere.

Notable meteorites

• Allan Hills 84001 - Mars meteorite that was claimed to prove the existence of life on Mars.
• Canyon Diablo - Iron meteorite used by pre-historic Native Americans.
• Cape York - One of the largest meteorites in the world. A 34 ton fragment called "Ahnighito", is exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History; the largest meteorite on exhibit in any museum.
• Ensisheim meteorite - The oldest meteorite whose fall can be dated precisely (to November 7, 1492, at Ensisheim)
• Hoba - The largest known meteorite.
• Kaidun - Possibly from the martian moon Phobos.
• Orgueil - Object of a 1965 hoax that involved embedding a seed within part of the meteorite.
• Sayh al Uhaymir 169 - Originated from the moon; it fell to earth as a result of meteoroid strikes on the moon.
• Sikhote-Alin - Massive iron meteorite impact event that occurred on February 12, 1947.
• Willamette - The largest meteorite ever found in the United States.
• The Black Stone in the wall of the Kaaba in Mecca is thought to be a meteorite by some secular historians, but there is little support for this in the scientific literature
• Heat Shield Rock - Found on Mars.
• The Peruvian meteorite event - After a meteorite impact in Peru in 2007, hundreds of people that approached the rock fell ill from arsenic poisoning.

Apart from meteorites fallen onto the Earth, "Heat Shield Rock" is a meteorite which was found on Mars, and two tiny fragments of asteroids were found among the samples collected on the Moon by Apollo 12 (1969) and Apollo 15 (1971) astronauts.

Notable meteorite impacts craters

• Vredefort Crater in South Africa, the largest known impact crater on Earth (300 km diameter from an estimated 10 km wide meteorite).
• Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada (250 km diameter).
• Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Yucatán (170 km diameter) thought to be the source of the K-T Boundary which marks the end of the Mesozoic Era and existence of Dinosaurs.
• Manicouagan Reservoir in Québec, Canada (100 km diameter)
• Popigai crater in Russia (100 km diameter)
• Acraman crater in South Australia (90 km diameter)
• Chesapeake Bay impact crater (90 km diameter)
• Mjølnir impact crater in the Barents Sea (40 km diameter)
• Manson crater in Iowa (38 km crater is buried)
• Clearwater Lakes a double crater impact in Québec, Canada.
• Barringer crater in Arizona, also known as 'Meteor Crater' (1.2 km diameter)

Notable disintegrating meteoroids

• Tunguska event in Siberia 1908 (no crater)
• Vitim event in Siberia 2002 (no crater)

Meteorite-related news

• At approximately 12 pm local time on 15 September 2007 a meteorite left a 30m-wide crater near Desaguadero, Peru, emitting fumes that reportedly made witnesses ill.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070918/sc_afp/peruhealthoffbeat But a team of doctors sent to the site said they found no evidence the meteorite had sickened people, the Lima newspaper El Comercio reported Semptemeber 19, 2007. http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/09/19/peru.meteorite.ap/index.html
• Soon after 2 am local time (00:00 GMT) on 7 June 2006: on a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms in Norway, a bolide was observed by several residents, possibly followed by an impact. There is a question as to how large it was, but an associated explosion was heard throughout the region. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Large_meteorite_strikes_in_Norway
• On 12 June 2006, NASA reported that two rocks dubbed "Allan Hills," and "Zhong Shan," found by the Spirit rover on Mars, might be iron meteorites. Unlike in the case of "Heat Shield Rock," there are not yet any supporting compositional data for these objects, so their identities as meteorites are less certain http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20976.
• Freehold Township, New Jersey object that crashed through a home's roof January 2, 2007 is space junk and not a meteorite. See article following. http://www.space.com/news/ap_070511_freehold_spacejunk.html

See also

• Atmospheric focusing
• Baetylus
• Center for Meteorite Studies
• Carbonaceous chondrite
• Geminids
• Impact depth
• Impact event
• Lake Siljan
• Leonids
• Meteor
• Meteor shower
• Meteoritical Society
• Solar System
• Vatican Observatory
• Temagami Magnetic Anomaly

References

External links

• Meteoroids Page at NASA's Solar System Exploration
• Current Meteorite News Articles
• Meteorite Community Site For Meteorite Hunters, Adventurers, Enthusiasts, & Scientists
• Planetary Science Research Discoveries: meteorite articles and photographs
• Meteorite hit
• Interview with Guy Consolmagno at Astrobiology Magazine (May 12, 2004). Vatican astronomer Dr. Guy Consolmagno discussed his research as curator of one of the world's largest meteorite collections
• The British and Irish Meteorite Society
• Largest meteorites
• Meteorite Times, the premier source for news and information about meteorite collecting
• The Natural History Museum's Meteorite Catalogue Database
• Meteoritical Society