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Historical Meteorites |
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Historical Meteorites |
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| A 10:38 am on the morning of February 12, 1947 a huge fireball appeared
over the Sikhote-Alin mountains of eastern Siberia. This fireball announced
the arrival of a largest iron meteorite observed fall on record. Loggers
in the woods watched as the main mass split into several fragments less than
4 miles above the Earth's surface and heard tremendous explosions. The
resulting shock wave was felt 100 miles away! Not everyone realizes this but the Sikhote-Alin iron meteorite fall of February 12, 1947 actually produced two distinctly different types of meteorites; thumbprinted individuals and shrapnel. Mostly what you see for sale by dealers are the thumbprinted specimens because for some reason almost all dealers prefer to sell them over the shrapnel type because they say they are "more beautiful" or "what the public thinks a meteorite should look like." This is nonsense! In his book Rocks from Space, O. Richard Norton describes what Russian scientists found when they first came upon the impact scene: A typical meteorite fragment was smooth and rounded on one side and often showed flow lines where the metal had melted and flowed along the surface. The other side was altogether different - generally flatter, with edges that were highly distorted and bent. The edges curled around from the smooth front side, forming ragged claws that could easily tear someone's skin if handled roughly. . .These meteorites formed when a single large mass struck the ground and splintered into thousands of much smaller fragments." Shrapnel specimens are a great example of a different type of meteorite from a great witnessed fall and a testament to the powerful kinetic energy forces from a falling meteorite! |
