That's a nice picture of a handful of magnetite at the top of the article, too.
-Michael in so. Cal.
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 1:10 PM, dorifry dori...@embarqmail.com wrote:
The idea that small meteorites can start fires has become common knowledge
in the mind of the general public.
I like how he calls them nickel rocks, and how they speculate in the last
paragraph that meteor showers may have started the Chicago Fire!
http://kdrv.com/oregon_trails/233107
By Ron Brown
SAMS VALLEY, Ore. -- This past summer marks the 17th anniversary of one of
the biggest fire seasons in Southern Oregon in several years, including the
Hull Mountain Fire in Sams Valley. Investigators are pretty sure that fire
was arson-caused.
There was another fire in the same area just a few weeks later. It was called
the Sprignet Butte Fire, and burned over a thousand acres in the Evans
Creek area.
Those who were in the Rogue Valley in the summer of 1994 remember it as a
particularly bad year for wildfires. Within weeks of the end of the Hull
Mountain Fire, which burned several homes and killed a man, another fire
broke out near Sprignet Butte, just a mile or so from the start of the Hull
Mountain Fire.
Investigators say several ignition points were located, near a forest road.
It certainly looked like the work of arsonists, maybe the same person who
started the Hull Mountain Fire, but could there be another explanation?
Sharon Weeg thinks so. She lived near there then, and had already been
evacuated three times because of fires that summer. She says fire
investigators then were skeptical. They'd never heard of a meteorite started
a wildfire. After all these years, she's convinced that space rock landed in
the tinder-dry forest and started the Sprignet Butte Fire.
The question always remained... What happened to any of that meteorite? Could
it have survived? And could it still be up there? That's where Tony Gallios
comes into the story. Earlier this year he met Sharon Weeg at Accurate
Locators in Gold Hill, shopping for parts for his metal detector. When she
told him about the meteorite she saw, his curiosity led him to go on a search
into the hills near east Evans Creek, to see if he couldn't find a trace of
that space rock.
Gallios found three pieces of nickel rock that seems to meet all the tests so
far for being a meteorite. There were three pieces, all within a few inches
of each other. All seem to fit together. Gallios says he's in contact with
the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory to confirm that it is, in fact, a space
rock.
It's been a little over 17 years ago when the Sprignet Butte Fire burned
across those hills, scorching almost 1,200 acres. State fire investigators at
first thought it was an arsonist that started those fires. Now there's a
chance that the stones that were found by Tony Guillios could've been
meteorites that could actually started a good part of that fire.
Dick Pugh with the Cascadia Meteorite Lab is attempting to catalogue every
meteorite that's ever landed in Oregon. He says there's about a half dozen so
far and the first were actually just a few miles from the rock Tony Found, on
Sams Creek near Gold Hill. Actually, several pieces were found mostly by gold
miners.
Others have been found near Klamath Falls, in Antelope Valley, and near
Lakeview. If the meteorites did start the Sprignet Butte Fire, there may be
other pieces still out there. Not hot any more, but perhaps the smoking
guns fire investigators have been looking for almost two decades.
Scientists and fire investigators are not sure that meteorites the size of
the objects found by Gallios really can start fires. Some speculate that a
rash of fires in 1871, including the great Chicago Fire and the Peshtigo,
Wisconsin Fire could have be linked to meteor showers that summer. Meanwhile,
others observers say meteorites are actually too cool when they hit the
ground to start a fire.
__
Visit the Archives at
http://www.meteoritecentral.com/mailing-list-archives.html
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
__
Visit the Archives at http://www.meteoritecentral.com/mailing-list-archives.html
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list