Chris, it is a hell of a crater, at least 13 meters in
diameter, more than one meter of uplift, looks
identical to Meteor Crater to me, on a much smaller
scale.
There in fact does seem to be shocked material at the
crater, I found only inside and just outside the
crater, large pieces of compacted sandstone, yet there
is no sandstone there, it seems to have solidified on
the impact, everything else is more like soft mud.
Large, and I mean larger pieces of sod, weighing at
least 40 or 50 kilograms were thrown more than 50-100
meters, and smaller dirt clod debris thrown up to 15o
meters in all directions. This is a serious impact, I
mean you can call it what you want, but with the
uplift, the incredible debris field thrown to all
sides, the huge size, and volume of the crater itself,
certainly leads me to believe that the mass weighed
many tons and is obviously in the hole under some
meters of fallback debris. The locals report mushroom
cloud lingered for more than a hour.
As far as more pieces, this meterite came in over lake
Titikaka, and if you have never seen this lake, it is
HUGE! I would guess that as fragil as the meteorite
is, that tons of debris fell off but would most likely
have all fallen into the lake, or perhaps some on the
mountains just inside of Bolivia. It is not populated
there, and I assume from talking to most witnesses,
that the large main mass, which was a massive ball of
fire much larger and brighter than the Sun, caught
everyones attention pretty well, and would be so
bright that smaller pieces would be drowned out by the
intensity of the main mass. That is what I think
happened, surely many more pieces broke off but from
where the main mass hit, back down the flightpath is
nothing but swamps and high mountains for about 10
miles, then 15 miles of lake. Perfect for most
material to be lost.
Michael Farmer
--- Chris Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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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