(Sorry if your part of my e-mail list and get this twice, didn't mean to send it there) Paper: Lethbridge Herald City: Lethbridge, Alberta Date: Thursday, March 10, 1949 Page: 16
SIBERIAN METEORITE (From the Manchester Guardian.)
The arrival on earth of a giant meteorite is a rare occurrence. When it happens we may be reasonably content if it is at the other end of the world rather than in own neighborhood. There seems no reason in the nature of things why the thousand-tonner which struck a remote spot in Eastern Siberia on February 12, 1947, should now have landed in Lancashire. We should not then have had to wait to find its arrival recorded in "Nature" nearly two years later, but, on balance, we need not grumble at that. we are more inclined, if it is not too late, to congratulate the distant inhabitants of the Amoor River valley that the strange monster found its target in the neighboring mountain range and apparently caused little human loss. It came in daylight and almost outshone the sun for a few seconds for which it was seen from every town and village within 125 miles. The noise of the explosions which accompanied it and of the final crash were carried nearly as far and meteoric fragments were scattered over a radius of seven or eight miles. there seems to have been no central crater of the Arizona type, the whole meteorite breaking up into thousands of fragments, but more than a hundred funnels were found in the rocks, some of them six yards deep and three times as wide, and there was considerable destruction of trees. Though rather fanicfully described by one of the Russian scientists as a "minor planet," this was certainly an outsize in land-falling meteorites, and geo-physicists the world over will take all the interest in it that they are allowed. A large part of the affected region has been closed and placed at disposal of he Academy of Sciences if the U.S.S.R., which has already sent two expeditions to the site. But so long as the present theory of Russian science for the Russians prevails, international scientists are likely to find Eastern Siberia even more remote than it has usually been. Please visit, www.MeteoriteArticles.com, a free on-line archive of meteor and meteorite articles. Please visit, www.MeteoriteArticles.com, a free on-line archive of meteor and meteorite articles. |
