Slashdot Mirror
Kansas Soil Yields Massive Meteorite
ROMRIX writes "The Discovery Channel is reporting that Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar. The article also states that this type of radar may someday be used on Mars to locate water in a future mission."
So superman real right? heh knew it all along.
There are plenty of other places in our own world that could probably benefit from the discovery of water...try Africa. It seems like maybe that should be a higher priority?
I'd hate to get in the way of that radar if its moving 154 pound meteorites. My back of the envelope math suggests you could use it to microwave pizza leftovers the size of a small country. Like China.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Is it Smallville, Kansas? Because, uh, if it is, that's no ordinary meteorite...
I wonder, over the many millions of years that the earth has been around, how many other meteorites of this size or larger have struck ground and subsequently been covered with layers of dirt only to be uncovered later by construction workers who don't understand the value of the space rock, much less identify it as one.
One good thing about our travels to Mars is that every single person who will be there, at least for the early phases of the colony, will be scientists, so we won't have to worry about mislabelled meteorites.
Don't let the board of education find out about this.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
The dig was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find... "We know it is recent," said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. "Native Americans could have seen it."... The Brenham field was discovered in 1882. Scientists have since traced pieces of the shower as far away as Indian mounds in Ohio, indicating the meteorites were traded as pieces of jewelry and ceremonial artifacts. Certainly the most documented, but, I see a few hundred years of undocumented excavation in spite of that. I hope other excavations do better than that.
So many questions. Is Smallville, Kansas really true? Is there a consipiracy happening? Are they meteor freaks? Where do the government hide them? Belreave? Why are there no green glowing things on those meteor rocks?
Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite [CC] from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar.
Should have read "located with the help of ground-penetrating radar".
Not to be nitpicky... but it isn't really nitpicky to suggest that a 157-pound piece of a meteorite doesn't count as massive. The linked page has a picture, and it's not substantially larger than a human head. Maybe someone with a big head.
"The Discovery Channel is reporting that Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar."
Pfft! And you guys thought your "ground penetrating radar" was impressive.
The largest meteorite found in the US is 15 tons, so 154 pounds isn't all that "massive". What makes this unusual is the fact that it was found using ground penetrating radar, a method that may also be used on Mars.
In unrelated news: A small boy lifts a car over his head
Alternate title: "Big rock Found In dirt"
I'm kidding, of course. It's actually quite nice to see this kind of technology in action O:
But they have meteors muscling in on Dorothy's turf. It sounds like a terrifying place to live.
Task Mangler
"The linked page has a picture, and it's not substantially larger than a human head. Maybe someone with a big head."
They've unearthed Mr Potatohead.
thats intelligent falling!
There are some villains in the world that would pay handsomely for this... meteorite.
UPDATE: The meteorite found beneath a Kansas family farm was unearthed today. While digging, a pod like container was found with an infant inside. The infant was healthy, as shown when it threw a rattle given toit over 100 yards. The Kents, who own the farm, said they are planning to raise the baby and name it Clark.
I'm guessing the approximate rate of value for a meteorite changes when it is this large. Because I'd love to have a 157lb ~ 71.2140021 kilograms when 1 gram is worth about $10 Canadian [$8.80 US]
Oh You POS
Well it all depends...If the scientists are all from Kansas they will hardly believe all this nonsense like rocks from space (the heavens don't have rocks, duh!) and really you'd think any major 'rocks from the sky' that would have splashed down in the last seven thousand years would be in the document of histroy (aka The Bible) right? Plus of course with Bush in control of America and his Texan background of belief he'd probably set a requirement that any one setting foot on this Mars place that hes heard so much about would have to be from Kansas or Texas so they could put what they learnt through the excellent education systems provided by those states to good use!
I ate your fish.
I've seen this one in the sci-fi channel. Whatever they do to it, DONT TRY TO SEE WHATS INSIDE.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
I call dibs on the adamantium.
See, before humans figured out how to smelt iron out of ore, there were weapons made out of meteorite iron. A certain number of meteorites are nearly pure iron, and better yet, some is even already alloyed with stronger metals. They were rare and more expensive than gold, but it was a weapon which could pierce right through a bronze cuirass, and was often credited with magical properties. Kings and nobles paid a small fortune for them.
Some of the myths around that kind of equipment persisted even after it was known how to just smelt iron ore. E.g., the celtic myths about cold iron against elves. The only iron that can be processed without heating from start to finish is, you guessed, a chunk of stuff that was weapon-grade iron from the start, not ore. That's more often than not a meteorite.
So other than maybe modern times and construction crews with bulldozers, you wouldn't just throw away such a rock if you found one. You'd sell it to a smith for a small fortune, and he'd make a weapon for a king and sell it for a bigger fortune.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
insert obligitory kryptonite joke here.
I guess you missed this post, and this one and this one?
Geez bud, at least glance over the other posts...
GPR is a pretty common geophysical technique. Yes, it can be used to find meteorites, and yes it can (and will) be used for a future Mars rover mission. Such a system is already in development.
GPR is also used for many other things, like:
- groundwater contamination
- finding buried garbage
- finding voids under roads
- finding corpses
- determining stratigraphy of surficial sediments
For comparison several tons of meteoric material enters the Earth's atmosphere every day. If you've roof gutters try running a magnet over the accumulated sediment in the bottom of them, much of the metallic material collected thus is likely recently extraterrestrial in origin. This dust is considered an important part of the hydrologic cycle, providing upper-atmosphere nuclii for water to condense around and form raindrops.
Of meteoric material that reaches the Earth's surface structurally intact (roughly 1cc or larger) there are only about 500 or so objects a year, of which around 1% are recovered for study. The rest are finds of older falls.
These finds are easiest in plains where they stand out in the soft soil with little other stony material. Another good source is permanent ice & snow fields. In both wind erosion & frost heaving can leave these sitting out on the surface for the collecting. "Dust bowls", when local vegetation dries in a drought up and winds scour the soil away, and the many retreating glacers due to global warming, both yield rich harvests. There are also places where a larger meteor broke up at low altitude and showered the area with a rich concentration of smaller bits.
Lastly there is an active market in meteorites, for both hobbyist collectors and those who ascribe religious or spiritual aspects to these stones. Unfortunately their collection is typically undocumented, so any possibility of determining their age or circumstance in situ is lost. That they go directly into private hands means that they are generally unavailable for research. Not all meteorites are of great scientific interest, but several rare types do contain important clues to the nature of the early solar system and the current makeup of asteroids & other like objects.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I would like to clarify about your weeds comment. At least in Alberta Canada (part of the great plains the bread basket of the world) ahref=http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/dept docs.nsf/all/acts4705?opendocument/rel=url2html-95 8http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs. nsf/all/acts4705?opendocument/>
This list of weeds is pretty much standard for Canada and (my guess) the states. It's also a safe bet to say that 99% of them are NOT native to north america. Case in point the tumble weed is from Russia. I know it ruins all those spaghetti westerns.
Hee Hee The drinking bird does all the work!
A meteorite that big would be worth a hell of a lot of money.
It can't have been a meteorite then - it must have been a "big rock that God buried there" :-)
You are an idiot. ID is not taught in Texas, and Bush is from Connecticut, so stop blaming him on us.
It took me several scans of the linked website to notice the photo foolishly placed in what is rapidly becoming the de facto column for advertisements.e _tec_zoom0.html?category=technology&guid=200610171 10000/
Here is a link to the full sized photo for those interested
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/17/meteorit
Note to website developers: If you use 'standard' layouts like this, don't bury information in places people have grown accustomed to seeing adverts !
"Massive" is a relative term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite, 66 tons. How it failed to make a crater I don't understand.
Cattle could be replaced with buffalo. They need far less maintenance, are immune to many cattle diseases, and their hooves + movement patterns actually help cultivate the grasslands.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
AP Story (Yahoo) with picture
Direct link to 7 picture slideshow (Yahoo)
--
Northern Virginia? Forum, Wiki, Ticket/Arrest database, etc
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Geez! Doesn't anyone watch Creepshow!?
This proves Superman was raised by Indians 10,000 years ago (so no, he wouldn't have fought us white men going to America). Wonder what he did back then. Did he help plant many of the religions? Was he still a moral person, or was he a pirate? Did he travel the world, or stay with his tribe? Sounds like a pretty interesting Elseworlds story to me. Although the writers would probably ruin it and have an Indian Lex Luthor discover Kryptonite.
At 154 pounds being just 69.85 kilograms (try google "154 pounds in kilos") I find the meteorite less than massive, sorry.
--
Superb hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
cf: Turin Turambar. You probably wouldn't want to spend too long with that sword, mind...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What a funny place to find it. They will probably try and legislate against a scientific study of it and teach kids in school that god was playing catch with a rock and dropped it
I want a mars witb hookers and blackjack and liqour.. actually, forget the liqour and blackjack. Every traveller? A scientist? I hope nothing
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Looks like Canada is gonna have to start selling our water to the 'States and europe.
First we'll have to stop being the worst water wasters on the planet though.
... green and glowing?
mark "Clark, come in and do your homework!"
I wonder, over the many millions of years that the earth has been around, how many other meteorites of this size or larger have struck ground and subsequently been covered with layers of dirt
Interestingly enough, most meteors and meteorites are found in the Antarctic. Not because it gets struck more frequently, but rather because of how much easier it is to find them. When you see a (black) rock lying on top of 2 miles of (white) ice, it's a safe bet it fell from the sky.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
This is where the Haviland Crater is. The crater is only .01 Km across so not much to see except circles. The circles are anthropogenic unfortunately.
The article is very inaccurate. The same field produced a 1400 pound one a year ago.
And NASA's radar wasn't responsible for finding this one.
NASA wanted to test their radar, so they contacted the guy finding these. He located (but didn't dig up) several more suspected meteorites using the same metal detector he has been using. Then waited for NASA to show up and see if their equipment can find what his metal detector already found.
Its scary how inaccurate the media can be....
Forget water, if this thing hit near Smallville it could confirm over 80 years of comic book legend!~
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
..the Ron Jeremy double penetration radar comes out and finds a new G spot.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's just a really big rock. One that happens to be glowing green and contains a small infant. I guess these sort of coincidences happen every day in Kansas.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Would they fine you for having wild grasses or for not mowing? Couldn't you have wild grasses, but mow them? (Maybe the wild grasses wouldn't survive that environment, but I suspect they would adapt quite nicely.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
everything you said about the cattle is true. Normal cattle more or less want to stay inside their pastures, they like the security (we raise beef here). If some little bull manages to wiggle out or jump the fence he will hangout alongside the fence as close to his herd as possible. he wants to get back in. Now there are some breeds making a comeback that can survive and thrive on rougher stuff, like dexters, and don't need as much care, but they are small, and if you take them to the local auction you won't get as much for them, but the tradeoff might be there if you can use a little more wild land and not have to put as much time/money/effort into maintaining it.. Beefalo or the cattle bison hybrids almost caught on, but they have the same temperment as the bison, or can, that's a crapshoot. But those straight buffalo, man, you need a *serious* fence for them boys, some guy near here has some, try a 6 foot fence with 8 strands of heavy guage barbed wire and twice as many fence poles as regular.
It was the entire basis of the iron age. Most early tools made of iron were meteorite fragments melted down or hammered into tool shapes. The Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa, The Cape York Meteorite of Greenland or the Saarenmaa Island impact in Estonia all became major ironmaking centers of their time. With 78% of our planet's surface covered with water in one form or another it seems like a plentiful resource to us. On Mars, where the water content is a fraction of a percent it is a precious commodity that will make life possible. I hold in sympathy those who live in drought stricken areas but our planet's climates are in a state of constant flux. We cannot "control" the nature of our environment on a macroscopic scale. Water is not going to be available everywhere and in many areas it will be naturally contaminated with salt, arsenic, alluminum, alkali or sulphurs.
Tisha Hayes
The entire Earth was formed by small impacts like this, each impact, on average, making the Earth a little larger.
If strange lightening bolts start hitting the thing, run.
The real story here is that they were able to unearth (to dig or get out of the earth; dig up.) the meteorite with RADAR. Quite a feat indeed.
Next thing you know, they'll be using SONAR to alter the behavior of sea mammals...
Now with more sodium!!
Organic matter in landfills are converted by anaerobic bacteria to methane and carbon dioxide, both greenhouse gases. Many landfills capture the methane and burn it to generate steam, for process use, electricity generation, or both. UCLA put in a cogeneration plant while I was a graduate student in chemistry.
Counting the carbon-based fuels involved in grass production and disposal, it's a net minus for carbon storage.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Sodium, magnesium, and most of all, sulphate salts. In fact in both Gusev and Meridani, there is a layer of hardpan a couple inches down into the soil, where evaporating water has left behind a layer of salt - this fits the cryospher model.
Compare the last sentence of this article to the last setence of Discovery's article on chinese sinkholes:
_ pla_02.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/18/sinkhole
"I didn't figure there would be that much scientific value," he said. "It is interesting history."
WTF?
There is a GREAT series of novels about this (but whose central theme is more of Britain's ascent after Roman rule). These stories includes some great explanations of how weapons might have been made from meteorite-based ore, most specifically (PLOT SPOILER AHEAD)
an explanation for King Arthur's "sword in the stone". Check 'em out: The Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_whyte
And all this time, the Wicked Witch of the West thought it was the house that killed her sister.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Is that this is one of the first time (or perhaps the first time?) they were able to recover a meteorite this deep, while preserving and studying the soil above it and the track it made in the earth around it. Usually, one finds meteorites when their plow runs into one, causing the impact zone to be disturbed.
http://notanumber.net/
Look at the upper center of the picture.
Peace and love, y'all
The rest of this article is interesting and a great technological advancement, but to drop crap like that in there is ridiculous. I don't believe it will be likely we'll go to Mars by 2020, considering the terrestrial BS we're contending with right now and will be for many years to come.