[X] My Assistant

[nprev]

Here's a weird one: dozens of people ill in Peru after an apparent meteorite impact into swampy terrain. If for real, I'm thinking that the rock liberated some swamp gasses....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7001897.stm

[CosmicRocker]

... Has anyone heard of any planned excavation efforts in the crater? There should be some serious chunks of the object in there somewhere. I'm just afraid that the apparently volatile nature of the terrain may make recovery difficult if not impossible...

Someone on the IRC #space channel posted this link to several pages of pictures and descriptions by a meteorite collector and seller who went to the site, collected some samples, and encouraged the locals to excavate and preserve the main object.

It sounds as if he was almost successful, but then had some trouble with police he described as corrupt. He has posted more pictures of fragments of the object, which he interprets to be a breccia. He also has much better pictures of the crater than I have seen elsewhere, and one picture of the smoke trail in the sky, which I hadn't seen anywhere.

[dvandorn]

He has posted more pictures of fragments of the object, which he interprets to be a breccia.

Hmmm... for some reason, I was surprised at the thought of a meteor being a breccia. The more I think about it, though, the more reasonable it sounds.

I can well imagine that a lot of meteors are "flakes" of material that has been ejected from energetic collisions between asteroids. And it makes sense that much of the material that would be flung away from such an impact would be some of the most energetically altered. Those are prime conditions for forming breccias.

Is this what chondritic breccia looks like? All of the breccias I have ever seen were composed of clasts of differentiated materials, and matrices made up of shock melt generated from differentiated materials. Since chondritic material is, by definition, undifferentiated, I suppose breccias made up of them might look a little different from anything I've ever seen.

It does also occur to me, though, that many asteroids show signs of having melted enough to undergo some degree of differentiation. So I can also imagine there are a lot of breccias floating around out there which are mixtures of chondritic and differentiated materials.

I love geology, ya know?

-the other Doug