What remains to be determined is if this is actually a crater, or just a
big splash. In the first case, some shocked material should show up, and
I think it's likely that nothing is left in the bottom. If there really
is a big meteorite at the bottom, then this probably isn't a crater in
the usual sense (that is, produced by a large energy release as the
parent body explodes/vaporizes).
I don't believe I've seen anything credible to suggest that the water
was actually boiling or steaming. It doesn't take much energy to make a
hole this size in soft ground- probably around 100 kg TNT equivalent.
And that's not enough to heat up that much water very much. So I expect
that any apparent bubbling was nothing more than an effect of ground
water filling in the new hole.
If the recovered material is shocked fragments, it may be structurally
quite different from the parent body.
Chris
*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Carnacas smoke-trail photos
On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 15:54:57 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
Is it indeed possible that a mass of say 3-7 tons
could cause such intense heat on impact? We think that
the compression of the soil, in an instant to many
meteors deep could also cause intense heating.
Every person we interviewed decribed boiling water,
lots of steam, and horrible sulfer type smell. The
What I wonder is if maybe the pressure/heat could have caused
dissolved gases to
bubble out from the water? So it might not have been at a boiling
temperature,
but still bubbling/steaming? Too bad we don't have samples of the
groundwater
and soil from the area to see if there is anything weird/extensively
poluted
about it.
Also odd, of course, is a fraglie, porus stone as you describe
surviving to the
ground big enough and fast enough to make the crater.
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