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."
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since when does Africa have massive quantities of water frozen slightly beneath its surface? Plus, I'd always heard that most of Africa has decent access to water, but it was the purification that was the problem -- hence few people dying of thirst outright, and most getting sick of water borne illnesses.
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.