Published Again!
On September 23rd 2008, I wrote about how over the moon I was when I discovered I’d had a submission published in October’s Fortean Times. When the November edition of the magazine was delivered, I couldn’t be more surprised to see that I was in there again!
Last time, it was a submission for the magazine’s It Happened To Me column, and it took two years for them to publish it. This time, I wrote in response to a letter in September’s edition — and the editors chose to publish my submission in the November issue. (I also posted it at the FT Bulletin Board, where you can read several responses to it.)
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Alan Wade’s letter about the “Meteoric mystery” (FT240:74) boldly stated that “No meteorites have ever been found in sedimentary rock” or “in coal”. I wondered whether the internet could help verify or, indeed, refute this statement.
A quick search yielded a page titled “A novel strategy for collecting fossil meteorites from coal” by Andrew A. Sicree and David P. Gold, a “recent” (though the date is not mentioned) project proposed by Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Geosciences.
The project’s aim is to try and find iron meteorites in coal by examining the “tramp” iron which is, apparently, already “pulled” from extracted raw coal by powerful electromagnets used at various mining sites. Sicree and Gold say that “fossil meteorites (i.e., those which have been preserved in sedimentary rocks and have geologically-old terrestrial ages) are quite rare. Only a few fossil meteorites are known and their discoveries have largely been matters of chance.” So they do exist — and they then cite a number of interesting finds.
In 1942, “an extremely weathered octahedrite (Sardis) from Miocene sediments” was discovered in Georgia, although whether it actually fell during the Miocene period is uncertain — using Carbon-14 dating, its terrestrial age was reckoned to be “in excess of 10,000 years”. During the drilling of an oil well in Texas (apparently in the 1950s), it was reported that an iron meteorite, subsequently lost, was recovered from Eocene rocks. Relict chondrules “of stony meteorites were found in Mesozoic bauxites from the Ural Mountains.” Other chondrites have been found in “Middle Ordovician limestone from Brunflo, central Sweden,” and “from Ordovician limestones in the Österplana quarry at Kinnekulle, southern Sweden.” An “iron meteorite reportedly from Carboniferous rocks in Ukraine has been determined to be a fragment of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite” and was dated at “less than 10 million years” old. Finally, they mention “a small, nickel-bearing meteoritic fragment thought to have fallen 65 million years ago” that was “recovered from a sediment core from the floor of the northwest North Pacific Ocean” and described in a paper published in 1996.
Sicree and Gold also point out that “Upon impact with the Earth’s surface most iron meteorites begin to rust away rapidly, typically surviving only a few dozen years.” This may explain why many meteorites that fell in ancient times didn’t stick around long enough to be entombed by sedimentary strata or in developing coal seams. They add that “In desert environments they may persist for several thousand years or so. Those which have been recovered from Antarctic ice may represent falls which may have occurred as early as 300,000 to one million years ago but their terrestrial ages cannot be greater than the age of the ice sheets themselves.”
In 2002, New Scientist reported on a contentious suggestion by Dallas Abbot from Columbia University and Ann Isley from the State University of New York that “large meteorite impacts may not just throw up huge dust clouds but also punch right through the Earth’s crust, triggering gigantic volcanic eruptions.” Another reason, perhaps, that the physical evidence for larger meteorite strikes has been lost to us. The resulting apocalyptic eruption of magma would have obliterated the impact sites, the meteorites having been vapourised at the same time.
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My point wasn’t to show how knowledgeable I am (geology certainly isn’t one of my particularly strong points), but how easy it can be to check things these days by using the Internet. Before the advent of the web, coming across a definitive statement of ‘fact’ such as “No meteorites have ever been found in sedimentary rock” in a publication might have involved a trip to the local library and diligent research lasting several hours to verify or refute — if, indeed, one could even be bothered to do so, rather than just accepting it at face value. Instead, it took me about five minutes using Google.
Today, the advice from Euripides to “question everything” has never been more relevant, nor easier to put into practice. Indeed, the venerable Greek playwright actually exhorted us to “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.” A suitably Fortean axiom for these interesting times in which we live, wherein the true and the real are often confused.
