Part 1

LINCOLN LAPAZ AND JEAN LAPAZ

SPACE NOMADS METEORITES IN SKY, FIELD, & LABORATORY

HOLIDAY HOUSE, NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1961, BY LINCOLN LaPAZ & JEAN LaPAZ PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

PREFACE

Meteoritics is the study of the only tangible entities that reach us from outer space. Except for the meteorites, scientists have to depend entirely on studies of some form of radiation for all their knowledge of the wider cosmos lying outside of the atmosphere of the earth. And none of the radiations reaching us from various sources afar can be held in the hand for examination. Each type of radiant energy incident upon our earth—whether that energy be light from the sun or from the more distant stars or the galaxies, or the reflected light from the planets and moons of our Solar System, or the less familiar forms of radiation, such as radio waves and cosmic rays—must be measured and permanently recorded by complicated instruments. Often the results given by even the most sensitive and tractable of these scientific robots turn out to be exceedingly difficult for man, their master, to interpret.

But the meteorites require no such temperamental instruments for their measurement. They are themselves a permanent record. They can be weighed, sectioned, and polished. They can be studied chemically, microscopically, and radiometrically. In fact, they can be investigated directly, just as they are themselves, in our hands, by any method modern science may be clever enough to devise.

This is why, now with the world’s attention drawn to ambitious plans for the exploration of the cosmos, meteors and meteorites are of increasing interest and importance.

We have planned and written this book to be a sound and yet largely nontechnical introduction to the science of meteoritics. Our daily experiences in the Institute of Meteoritics have afforded us a fortunate advantage in making such a presentation. For, in addition to our work in the field, laboratory, and classrooms, we have frequently conducted young people through the museum and workrooms of the Institute and so have had the opportunity of learning their point of view at the same time they were venturing into ours. We hope our book will instill in the reader an abiding interest in the location and protection, the recovery and preservation and especially in the study of those cosmic missiles of iron, iron-stone, or stony composition that represent mankind’s only ponderable links with the vast universe lying beyond the limits of the earth’s atmosphere.

Although all photographs and special depictions not made by our staff are individually credited, we wish to express our personal thanks for the privilege of reprinting them here. All photographs that are without a credit line have been made by members of our staff.

Lincoln LaPaz Jean LaPazUniversity of New Mexico, Albuquerque, March 20, 1961

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE 5 1. A METEORITE FALLS IN THE TAIGA, U.S.S.R. 11 2. A METEORITE FALLS IN THE WHEATLAND, U.S.A. 23 3. FOUND AND LOST GIANTS 36 4. WHEN IS A CRATER A METEORITE CRATER? 42 5. HEAVEN KNOWS WHERE OR WHEN 66 6. FINDERS FOOLISH, FINDERS WISE 75 7. LANDMARKS, SKYMARKS, & DETECTORS 84 8. THE NATURE OF METEORS 101 9. THE NATURE OF METEORITES 118 10. TEKTITES, IMPACTITES, & “FOSSIL” METEORITES 134 11. OMENS AND FANTASIES 147 12. THE MODERN VIEW 158 13. PRESENT AND FUTURE APPLICATIONS 166 FOR FURTHER READING 177 INDEX 181

SPACE NOMADS METEORITES IN SKY, FIELD, & LABORATORY

1. A METEORITE FALLS IN THE TAIGA, U.S.S.R.

The morning of February 12, 1947, dawned cold but bright and sunny in the wide Ussuri valley of Eastern Siberia. During the early morning hours the people in the villages went about their everyday chores as usual. Farmers fed and watered their livestock, while housewives tidied rooms and fired up stoves for heating and baking. Miners went to work deep underground. An artist seated himself outdoors near his home to make exercise sketches. In a densely wooded area on the slopes of a nearby mountain range, a logging crew began a day’s timber-cutting.

Suddenly, at 10:35 a.m., an extraordinarily large and brilliant fireball flashed above the central part of the mountain range. It streaked across the sky in less than 5 seconds and disappeared beyond the western foothills of the range. Then the inhabitants of a wide area heard what seemed to them a mighty thunderclap followed by a powerful roar like an artillery cannonade. Many people felt a strong airwave. (Field parties later found that those who noticed this effect were quite close to the place where the meteorite fell.)

For several hours afterward, a large black column of smoke tinged with a reddish-rose color stood above the place of fall. Gradually, this cloud spread outward, became curved and then zigzag in form, and finally vanished toward the end of the day.

The flash of the fireball and the loud noises that followed it caused panic among the farm animals. Cows lowed mournfully and herds of goats scattered in every direction, chickens and other fowl squawked in alarm, and dogs ran whining for shelter or crouched against the legs of their masters.

In the villages, the airwave blew snow off the roofs of houses and other buildings, while the strong earth-shocks opened windows and made doors swing ajar. Housewives were dismayed to see glass windowpanes shattered in their frames and burning coals and firebrands jolted out of the wood-burning stoves.

Even deep in the mineshaft, the vibrations in the air were strong enough to snuff out the miners’ lamps, leaving the men in darkness.

On seeing the huge fireball streak across the sky, the artist put aside his practice sketch and began a picture of the display before his impressions of it could fade. His painting of this natural event is now famous. Not only is it on display in scientific museums all around the world, but a color reproduction of it has been issued in Russia as a postage stamp.

The forester supervising the logging crew reported that his attention was first attracted to the sky when he noticed a strange “second” shadow rotating rapidly about the tree that cast it. On looking up, he saw a blindingly bright fireball, twice as large as the sun, a fiery globe that threw off multicolored sparks as it passed. Not long after the fireball disappeared behind the trees, the forester heard a loud noise like nearby cannonading and saw a large dark-colored cloud—later tinged with red—billow up over the impact point. (The members of the logging crew were among the very few persons actually abroad near the place of fall. It turned out that they were only about 9 miles from it.)

As soon as the many eyewitnesses of the fireball had recovered from their fright, the questions almost everyone asked were “What could it have been?” and “Where did it come down?” To answer the first question was not as difficult as to answer the second. Local scientists in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, the nearest cities of some size, suspected from the first that a very large meteorite fall had occurred. But exactly where? All they could be certain of was that the impact point lay in the Ussuri taiga, a formidable wilderness.

The Sikhote-Alin mountains lie along the Siberian coast between the Sea of Japan and the Tatar Strait. The Ussuri taiga is a vast, low-lying, marshy, densely forested region fronting the western flanks of these mountains. Ordinary cedars, pines, oaks, and aspen grow in the taiga, but the region is also noted for such rare plants and trees as the celebrated ginseng, the cork tree, the Greek nut tree, and the black birch. Wild grape and ivy vines intertwine the upper branches of the thick forest, and the trunks of the trees themselves rise from an almost impenetrable maze of brush and downed timber.

So dense is the forest that in summer, a man can see no more than 10 or 12 feet in any direction. Yet in winter, the explorer’s lot is no easier; for, although the deciduous trees then stand leafless, the ground is covered by three feet or more of snow. And in the early fall, violent cloudbursts often flood the taiga, making travel impossible.

Such was the inhospitable region in which the Ussuri, or (as it is now known in the U.S.S.R.) Sikhote-Alin meteorite, had chanced to fall. For any search parties traveling on the ground, the likelihood that they could find the fallen meteorite in that wilderness would have been very small.

The impact point of the Ussuri meteorite was discovered in the only way really practical: from the air. Fortunately, the center of impact lay almost directly below the airlane connecting the towns of Iman and Ulunga, so that the devastation produced by the meteorite fall in the taiga was clearly visible to aviators following this active air route.