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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.
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.
If it weren't for those meddling scientists!
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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'll just bet the water it contacted was, upon further study, found to be wet.
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Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
How about if I claim a government cover-up? Where are the men in black?
Take a look at this light, please. *FLASH*
Arsenic pollution doesn't have to be man-made, and groundwater-borne arsenic frequently isn't. Go check out the Wikipedia page on it, which is also summarized nicely here. The external links are particularly enlightening, and you can check up on all those shiny statistics.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
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.
Yeah, those poor, uneducated Peruvians and their backwards, self-polluting, toxic-drinking-water ways. Imagine dumping your arsenic right there where you live. Well, you WILL have to imagine, because if you RTF, you'll note that the area has naturally occuring arsenic deposits. It's in the ground water, and it's always been in the ground water. Nice troll, though!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Have we learned nothing from 1950's horror movies?
Or even 1970's science fiction?
If it's glowing, and just came from outer space, RUN. AWAY.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Meteor's don't impact anything but meteorites do. Perhaps confusingly they leave a meteor crater.
Fair enough. My sources are as follows. However, not a single one of them is from this article. And since they obviously contradict it, it would seem that there is NOT a unanimous agreement as to what happened.
The object, Woodman said, was metallic in nature and created a crater 42 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The impact also registered a 1.5-magnitude tremor on the institute's seismic equipment.Ronald Woodman is the director of the Peruvian Geophysical Institute.
Mid sized meteorites are not hot. I'll say it again: Mid sized meteorites are not hot. First, meteoroids are naturally cold. They've been out in the frigid blackness of space for many billions of years -- these rocks are cold down to their very center. Second, because of its size there's a good chance that this meteorite was originally part of a larger meteor that broke up anywhere between 60 and 30km above the surface. If that is the case, the larger meteor's cold interior would become the smaller meteor's cold exterior. Since hardly any surface heating takes place lower than about 30km, this cold surface doesn't warm up by any appreciable amount. Some meteorites, located soon after landing, have actually been reported to have frost on the surface due to their still cold interior.
There 'preliminary' analysis quoted in this article is contradicted by the following; In addition, Woodman stated that astrophysicist José Ishitsuka of Peru's Geophysics Institute, had collected samples of the meteorite and had confirmed that it contained a high degree of iron. It was reported that Ishitsuka retrieved a 3-inch magnetic fragment of the meteorite and has based his conclusion after studying its properties.
What I am attempting to say, is that there is NOT any 'proof' as to what this was, at least not yet. And to simply accept the explination that it was a meteor without the evidence to support it, is not acceptable in any scientific attempt at explaining what happened here. In time, it may be 'proven' to be a meteorite. But that time is not now. It is merely 'speculation' that is a meteorite. Lots of things that fall from space can have a 'high degree of iron', some of them are manmade.