Professor solves a meteor mystery
By: Chaz Firestone
Posted: 4/4/08
Last September, something strange landed near the
rural Peruvian village of
Carancas. Two months later, so did Peter Schultz.
One was an extraterrestrial fireball that struck the
Earth at 10,000 miles per
hour, formed a bubbling crater nearly 50 feet wide
and afflicted local villagers
and livestock with a mysterious illness. The other
is the Brown geologist who
may have figured out why.
The fiery mass shot across the morning sky bursting
and crackling like
fireworks, villagers said after the Sept. 15 impact.
An explosive crash tossed
nearby locals to the ground, shattered windows one
kilometer away and kicked up
a massive dust cloud, covering one man from head to
toe in a fine white powder.
Many thought the streaking fireball - brighter than
the sun, by some accounts -
was an aerial attack from neighboring Chile.
Curious shepherds and farmers approached the crash
site to find a smoking crater
reminiscent of a Hollywood film, laden with rocks
and stirring with bubbling
water that emitted a foul vapor. But curiosity
turned to fear when unexplained
symptoms began to crop up in Carancas: headaches,
vomiting and skin lesions
struck more than 150 villagers, Peru's Ministry of
Health stated days later.
Locals reported that their animals lost their
appetites and bled from their
noses. Children were restless and cried through the
night.
But according to Schultz, the professor of
geological sciences who visited the
site last December, the true mystery in Carancas is
how any of this happened in
the first place.
Sophisticated theory and conventional wisdom have
long agreed that most meteors
break into fragments and fizzle out before they can
reach the Earth's surface.
Even those large and durable enough to make it
through the atmosphere hit the
ground as ghosts of their former selves, "plopping
out of the sky and forming a
bullet hole in the Earth," Schultz said. "This
meteor crashed into the Earth at
three kilometers per second, exploded and buried
itself into the ground."
Last month, Schultz delivered a highly anticipated
lecture at the 39th Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas.
And if he's right, the bold
theory he proposed there may shake loose a "gut
response" entrenched within the
geological, physical and astronomical sciences:
"Carancas simply should not have
happened."
A Web of speculation
The handful of shepherds who happened to lead their
Alpaca herds near the arroyo
that day may have been the first humans ever to
witness an explosive meteor
impact. But the rest of the world quickly got its
chance, if vicariously,
through a flurry of activity in the blogosphere.
Hundreds of scientists, journalists and captivated
amateurs weighed in on the
bizarre events as they unfolded, offering scores of
pet theories and radically
revising them as more information streamed in from
Peru.
Pravda, a Russian online newspaper born out of a
print version run by the
country's former Communist Party, ran the headline
"American spy satellite
downed in Peru as U.S. nuclear attack on Iran
thwarted" five days after the
impact. The story attributes the villagers' illness
to radiation poisoning from
the satellite's plutonium power generator.
Other proposed explanations were less sensational.
Nevadan wildlife biologist
and amateur geologist David Syzdek wrote a Sept. 18
blog post titled "Meteorite
strike in Peru gassing villagers? Maybe not." In it,
he proposed that a mud
volcano producing toxic gases was responsible for
both the illness and the
crater.
"The Andes are very active geologically so I think
there is a good possibility
that this crater was caused by an outburst of
geothermal activity," he wrote.
As for the blinding light shooting across the sky,
Syzdek chalked it up to
coincidence.
"Fireballs are quite common," he wrote. "One
possible scenario is that the
people who saw the fireball just happened on a
recently formed mud volcano while
they were out looking for the fireball impact site."
Though Pravda and Syzdek drew radically different
conclusions from the reports,
what they shared with each other, many bloggers and
even some scientists was a
healthy skepticism about reports coming out of Peru.
Pravda and Syzdek both
pointed out in their posts that an explosion
powerful enough to create such a
large crater would be equivalent to 1,000 tons of
TNT, or a tactical nuclear
strike.
"When I first saw the news reports, they just didn't
seem right," Syzdek later
said in an interview. "Explosive impacts like this
just don't happen."
'A hyperspeed curveball'
Gonzalo Tancredi, a Uruguayan astronomer who
collaborated with Schultz in
Carancas, said initial reports of the impact
confounded amateurs and Ph.D.s
alike. Bewildered scientists even entertained the
possibility of a hoax as
rumors floated around the scientific community.
"At the beginning, there were some doubts about what
really happened there,"
Tancredi said. "We thought maybe it was a meteor
fall or maybe it was something
else, even something fake."
But when Tancredi visited Carancas a few weeks
later, what he observed silenced
the conspiracies and pointed unequivocally to one
conclusion.
Tancredi interviewed locals, who reported a large
mushroom cloud that formed
over the crater and compression waves that knocked
villagers to the ground. He
also found pieces of soil and rock that had been
launched over three football
fields from the crater - one piece even pierced the
roof of a barn 100 meters
away. Combined with analyses of infrasound detectors
and the patterns of crater
"ejecta," the evidence pointed to a genuine and very
powerful meteorite impact.
But the question that remained on everyone's mind
was how the meteor got there
at all - a scientific riddle that was made even more
challenging by Michael
Farmer.
Farmer is a controversial figure in the geological
community. He is a meteorite
hunter, a poacher of alien rocks who travels to
impact sites around the world -
usually the "bullet hole in the Earth" type
mentioned by Schultz - and collects
whatever he can find, often brushing up against
authorities and other hunters.
Meteorite hunting is Farmer's full-time job; he
profits from selling what he
finds.
