meteorite

For the past fifty years, scientists who study meteorites have been attempting to solve a mystery concerning the origin of chondrules which are tiny millimeter-size glassy droplets of once-molten rock that meteoriticist Henry Sorby described as "drops of fiery rain" in 1877. These mysterious little droplets are seen in 85% of the meteorites that shower down upon our planet. Solving this great meteorite mystery is difficult, because chondrule formation has not been observed in modern times--the right conditions for their formation probably have not existed for over 4.5 billion years in our Solar System, when a primordial disk of dust and gas (called a protoplanetary disk) circled our newborn Sun. In July 2013, scientists suggested that they may have discovered the strange origin of these my...

The rock with arguably the most fascinating story on Earth has an ancient name: Tomanowos. It means “the visitor from heaven” in the extinct language of Oregon’s Clackamas Indian tribe. The Clackamas revered the Tomanowos – also known as the Willamette meteorite – believing it came to unite heaven, earth and water for their people. Surface detail of the Tomanowos meteorite, showing cavities produced by dissolution of iron. Eden, Janine and Jim/Wikipedia, CC BY Rare extraterrestrial rocks like Tomanowos have a kind of fatal attraction for us humans. When European Americans found the pockmarked, 15-ton rock near the Willamette River more than a century ago, Tomanowos went through a violent uprooting, a series of lawsuits and a period under armed guard. It’s one of the strangest rock stories...

Tag: meteorite

The Great Meteorite Mystery!

Tomanowos, the meteorite that survived mega-floods and human folly