Meteorite fragment 3 pack collection series#

Kansas was, therefore, an enticing search location, but before digging into midwestern mud, the Meteorite Men dug through historical records. The author and his 'Meteorite Men' co-host Steve Arnold with a 273-pound meteorite they found buried in a farmer's field in Kiowa County, Kansas. Some of those rocks were substantial meteorites. Kansas plowmen, protecting their valuable 19th century blades, went to the considerable trouble of excavating an occasional heavy rock that got in their way. Rather, intensive farming over the centuries, combined with a paucity of terrestrial rocks, made extraterrestrial material more noticeable. Steve Arnold and I found more space rock by weight in the Sunflower State than all other sites combined and it was not because more meteorites fell there. Dry deserts do a better job of preserving meteorites and the lack of vegetation makes them easier to spot.īut Kansas was my true meteorite jackpot. Those 'hot spots' have yielded many meteorites because the conditions for finding them are favorable. If finding a meteorite after even such a widely seen event is so difficult, where should we look? It might seem that more meteorites have fallen in Texas, Northwest Africa, Chile's Atacama Desert, and Antarctica, than other places, but that is a fallacy. The verdict? Nearly all of the incoming mass ablated away during the flight, illustrating the difficult-to-accept concept that even a massive blazing bolide, 'as bright at the sun,' can pay out very little in terms of hard space rock on the ground. We ourselves recovered only two golf ball-sized stones.

After thousands of hours of combined field time by all parties, about 3.5 kg of Mifflin meteorites were found - the weight of a small cat.

Meteorite fragment 3 pack collection series#

Some of them met us in the field, exclaiming: 'We saw your show and thought we'd give it a try!' By making a fact-based series about our work, we had created our own competition.Īn exacting, almost fanatical search followed. Determined to find something from the dazzling spectacle seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses scattered across multiple counties and states, my co-host Steve Arnold and I made numerous trips to the fall zone, as did other meteorite hunters and scores of enthusiastic locals. While filming my Science Channel television series, ' Meteorite Men,' we investigated the 2010 Mifflin, Wisconsin fireball. (Image credit: Meteorite photos by Heritage Auctions) This Campo del Cielo meteorite, Lot 72048 in the auction, shows abundant tiny indentations known as regmaglypts - a feature unique to space rocks. Iron meteorites sometimes acquire remarkable surface features during their flight through Earth's atmosphere. We might expect less than ten recovered falls per year across our entire world, and the bulk of the extraterrestrial mass that does land is in the tiniest of pieces - settling, dust-like, onto fields, seas, forests, and even roofs. Statistically, the majority of incoming space rocks will sink into the oceans to be corroded away by salt water, as most meteorites are rich in iron, and we all know what happens to a pair of pliers left out in the rain.ĭocumented falls of larger meteorites - when 'large' perhaps equates to the size of a grapefruit - are rare. The relentless power of gravity pulls potential meteorites (known as 'meteoroids' until they hit the ground) through our atmosphere, super-heating their surfaces and often melting them into fantastical shapes. So, where are the meteorites? Space rocks fall randomly across the surface of our planet their short, blazing flights indifferent to the equator, or the poles. It is theorized that Earth encounters thousands of asteroidal debris fragments every day.