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Mysterious Peruvian Meteor Disease Solved
Technician writes "The meteor that crashed in Peru caused a mystery illnesses. The cause of the illness has been found. The meteor was not toxic. The ground water it contacted contains arsenic. The resulting steam cloud is what caused the mystery illness.
"The meteorite created the gases when the object's hot surface met an underground water supply tainted with arsenic, the scientists said." There is a very good photo of the impact crater in the article. The rim of the crater is lined with people for a size comparison."
It's funny because it's poisonous.
We never know what comes out of space :o)
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*rolls eyes*
I'm a nature photographer.
Bah! That's what they want you to believe. I prefer to believe my own complex conspiracy theory involving secret government projects, space aliens, and duct tape.
No! Imagine that! People being scared -- a human behaviorial characteristic, was a psychological thing. Um, isn't psychology the study of human behavior? Yeah. Brilliant scientist.
Really? Ya think?
My blog
If it weren't for those meddling scientists!
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
Yea, arsenic poisoning, that's a good one.
The symptoms match.
And, before anyone starts up with the whole "apple seed" thing - that's cyanide, not arsenic.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
The whole world ooohs and ahhhs at your mysterious meteor and the local chamber of commerce is rubbing its hands together, thinking about how many tourists will be dropping by to see the Terror From the Skies and then--oh, no, never mind. Sorry, folks, nothing to see here. We're just slobs and our place is a toxic shithole. Sorry about that. Just call us Newark south.
A mundane reason for the illnesses.
I guess I'll go put my tin-foil hat away..... Oh! Wait! How about if I claim a government cover-up? Where are the men in black?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I read on Pravda that the "meteor" was actually a downed US spy sat and it was done as a blue-on-blue false flag strike to be blamed on certain foreign powers as a prelude to starting a new war. The locals were suffering from radiation sickness from the plutonium core on the sat! And now you're saying there's a reasonable explanation? Feh. Pravda is my new Weekly World News, I just wish they'd pick up the Bat Boy features. I've been wondering what that little scamp is up to.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I was really looking forward to the zombie invasion.
The ground water it contacted contains arsenic.
Sounds like they have bigger things to worry about than silly meteors.
THE ALIENS HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS. NOW NO ONE IS LEFT. WHO CAN STOP THE UNSTOPPABLE? Already I am in my bunker, my dial up connection to the world furiously pounding bits to find the true evil. Where did these monstrousities come from? There, above the stars. Truly we must prepare. Guns are ready. The aliens menace will be destroyed.
All the witnesses have been silenced. The meteor has been taken away. The smoking man pauses, job well done. Arsenic. They'll believe that, before they believe the TRUTH.
This is my sig.
whew... its just the local arsenic tainted water supply...
i can just see Mulder and Scully booking their flights.
do do de do de dooooo
... the first stories of Peruvian cannibalism, and I'm grabbing my shotgun and heading for the hills...
What, again with the zombies?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I totally want a meteor crater in my back yard. I never get cool stuff like that.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Who finds it ironic that, given that the illness was caused by poisonous vapours from the crater, the publicity photo consists of people standing right next to it?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
You may be onto something here, In a drunken stupor I shoved a whistling bottle rocket into a full jar and got a 25 foot shmutz radius. We think the stick went back in time.
Meteor's don't impact anything but meteorites do. Perhaps confusingly they leave a meteor crater.
when it drops as fast as it has under this government.
I believe our currency has lost a third of its value in the last year. Much more of this and we'll be a third world nation again, like we were 200 years ago!
I'll stick to tap water.
Much about nature sucks.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There's an alternate theory going around- a Peruvian SCUD missile gone awry, and the fuel (Inhibited Fuming Red Nitric Acid) is what made people sick.
Please help metamoderate.
... this, but I found it amusing that that they're talking to all these geologists, and then the guy named "Ishitsuka" is an astronomer.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Those people are standing well back from the crater. Read the article with a critical eye. It says the crater is forty-two feet wide, and ten feet deep, or about big enough to hold two Chevy Suburbans. There's no way those people in the picture are anywhere near it.
Wouldnt actually producing the meteorite be proof? Isnt it a little premature to jump the gun with the assumption that the meteorite that was steaming hot causing all this groundwater steam to be produced? When no actual meteorite has been produced. So far, all that has been produced it whats called a 3-inch metallic fragment that CONTAINS iron.
Aside from the fact that meteorites are actually cold when they hit the ground, it just doesnt seem to be a very valid conclusion without any actual evidence to support it. This would fail a 7-th grade science class project on the scientific method. At least it would when I was in 7th grade... is this what passes now?
So to simplify, these are the verifiable facts;
1) There is a big hole in the ground.
2) Something made a big hole in the ground.
2) There were reports of the water appearing to 'boil' in the hole shortly after it was formed.
3) There is arsenic contained in some nearby groundwater aquifers.
4) Water boils when an object that is immersed in it contains ENOUGH specific heat to cause the water to reach its boiling point
5) No meteorite has been shown to exist physically (a 3-inch fragment that simply contains the element iron is not proof)
6) No peer reveiw has been done on the results or fragment claimed by the ONE man from the peruvian govt.
In short, coming to a conclusion of "It was a meteorite" is simply not able to be substantiated by the available evidence. IF numbers 5, and 6 are shown to be non-negative over more time, then and only then could it even be POSSIBLE that this was a meteorite.
Can anyone provide more supporting evidence that fits with the meteorite theory?
You guys are so dense. Arsenic this and UFO that. Pffft! Just look at the pictrue in that article. Doesn't it remind of another very VERY famous picture of similar nature? Goddammit! Do you want me to actually explain it? On /.? Really? The link under that pic says "Enlarge this" How is that for a hint?
HE IS BACK!!!
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Carancas is hell-and-gone in the middle of nowhere. The closest place with a Chamber of Commerce would be Puno, at least a day's travel in the back of a truck away, which has plenty of attractions of its own. The area is stunningly beautiful, worth a trip just to see the vistas. The people are pleasant and polite, with poor but neat farmsteads, with potato farming, livestock and some small-scale mining being the mainstays of the region. That close to the border they may do a certain amount of electronics and cigarette smuggling as well.
Areas like Carancas which have silver, lead, and copper deposits often have problems with arsenic and cyanide in their ground water. I rather suspected something like that from the beginning.
The above poster sounds similar to the racist bitch at the London Natural History Museum who thought that the locals had simply not noticed a stinking lake full of methane until the fireball drew their attention to it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Excerpts:
"Even as meteorite samples arrived in Lima Thursday for testing, Peruvian scientists seemed to unanimously agree that it was a meteorite that had struck their territory."
How can the scientist unanimously agree (unuusual in itself) if the samples were just arriving?
"Preliminary analysis by Macedo's institute revealed no metal fragments, indicating a rare rock meteorite."
I don't think there has ever been a meteorite in the past with 'metal fragments' if, by that term, they mean an unoxidized form of a metal. Many meterites contain iron, a 'metal,' but it is has always been present in an oxidized form. Maybe they mean that there was a complete absence of metals, oxidized or unoxidized, which would not be at all unusual (and certainly not 'rare). However, in that case, the next part of the article makes no sense:
"The samples also had a significant amount of magnetic material "characteristic of meteorites," she said. "The samples stick to the magnet," Ishitsuka, the astronomer, confirmed. "That shows that there is iron present." "
All in all, the article provides no useful information other than to say that arsenic is present in the groundwater, the arsenic ions were somehow present in significant quantities in the steam clouds created by the meteorite impact, and people inhaled the steam clouds and thereby somehow absorbed a significant amount of arsenic.
arsenic foil hat?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... obligatory response
Apostrophes don't pluralize anything but the letter S does.
then we could Blame Canada! for their smelter that spews heavy metals into the start of the river.
I wonder how many people took the mystery illness as some sign from a deity? Maybe they needed to sacrifice some more animals or offer up more herbs?
What about the condensation that someone claims is the crying Virgin Mary?
Just imagine that hundreds of years ago, this meteor may have started a religion. And even today scientific ignorance by society at large reinforces these myths.
This isn't a volcanic area, the closest hot springs are at least 50 or more miles away. And boiling water explosions don't create fireballs. Also, keep in mind that Carancas is around 13,000 or more feet above sea level, and the area is sparsely populated. The meteorite would have traveled through a lot less atmosphere, and probably much of its path would have been over Lake Titicaca, so I'm not surprised by a lack of reports of sonic booms. The heat to create steam wouldn't have come from the meteorite itself, rather from the kinetic energy released by the impact. Almost instantaneously excavating a 15 meter hole releases a LOT of energy. Just think about how much heat you would create during the couple of weeks it would take you to shovel that hole out. Now concentrate all that energy into an impact zone a couple of feet wide, and compress the time frame into a few milliseconds.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Our new arsenic-spraying meteoric overlords?
Lots of holes in that area. How came they get all the meteors? Not fair.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-16.630065,-69.230046&spn=0.019491,0.033474&t=h&z=15&om=1
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The Peruvian meteorite was quite small and it would have impacted at a relatively low velocity (small meteorites such as this one are in freefall soon after passing through the upper atmosphere.}
People need to step beyond the Hollywood depiction of "science".
The 'sizzling, bullet-fast impact causing a cloud of arsenic-laced steam' theory is crap.
Crazy Conspiricacy Theories: 0, Rational Science: A billion.
David Letterman had "toxic steam" on his show years ago when he was still on NBC.
You know it's true.
it was a transformer
Creepshow touched on this (kinda) in the eposide called The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...