It would be a real shame if the meteorite crater was named the Desaguadero crater. Desaguadero means "dirty water" in Spanish, akin to sewage type of water. I feel that Lake Titicaca meteorite would be much more appropriate. The actual crater is just a few short kilometers from the shores of Lake Titicaca. Lake Titicaca has historic as well as tourism value. All the people in the Lake Titicaca are are the same type of people and speak the same native language. The boarder between Peru and Bolivia is only political for Peru and Bolivia both share reaspective portions of the lake. Much of the world has never heard of Lake Titicaca, much less Desaguadero. I feel by associating  the meteorite fall with Lake Titicaca would help Peru to bring more tourism into this economically depressed area and allow Bolivia to share in some of this value.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/892616.stm

http://gosouthamerica.about.com/cs/bolandes/a/LakeTiticaca.htm

http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie.aspx?m=147539

http://www.crystalinks.com/laketiticaca.html

Efforts are underway to preserve the crater and extract the meteorite. A cover for the crater has been purchased and given to the people of Desaguadero for protecting the crater from the upcoming rains.

http://www.correoperu.com.pe/correosur/puno/resultado-busqueda.php
Easily translated using Google translation tool.


The penetration depth has been estimated to be greater that 10 meters below the crater in what the  Spanish speaking people call "Barro" or mud. TEN meters below the surface appears to be the minimum, it could well be 30 meters. Ballistic simulation models are currently being developed to estimate the actual penetration depth. The next step appears to be drilling a series of variable depth wells where a submersible magnetometer can be lowered to get magnetic field readings thus pinpointing the location of the meteorite. Current meteorite weight estimates are between 3 to 10 tons.

Then hopefully, a project plan for the extraction of the meteorite can be initiated. Digging 30 meters into the mud might involve a very large scale operation.

Randall Gregory

With due respect, but I don't quite agree with
H.C.'s comment regarding the (un-)importance of the "Carancas" meteorite fall: "There aren't many scientists who study this kind of meteorite, because they're so common." There are about 100 H4-5 chondrites but less than 5 of these are witnessed *falls*! Especially important will be the short-lived
radionuclides that will be measured, the cratering parameters, and, of course, those special features of the "Carancas" meteorite: shock veins, fusion crust, slickenides, regolith (yes or no?), two or even more lithologies (?), monomict, genomict or polymict breccia, and so much more to find out! Best regards from Germany, Bernd (Member of the Meteoritical
Society)

P.S.: Correction

You write: "a class that accounts for about
85 percent of the *meteors* found on Earth"

You don't find "meteors" on Earth but "meteorites"
A "meteor" is the luminous path a dust particle (shooting star) leaves behind during its descent +through the atmosphere of the Earth.

[AB: Thanks so much for the comment and correction. The reference to meteorites has been fixed.]

The only rotten eggs I smell here is the egg on some respectable scientific faces. There are limits to skepticism, as this case surely demonstrates.

This article is very belittling to the actual importance of this great story. There are plenty of reasons that this meteorite is of great significance. here is a list just to name a few of the reasons this fall will continue to be one of the most important events in meteoritic history.
1) Freshest fall with no weathering yet.
2) Museum quality specimens because the pieces were picked up quickly.
3) Scientific value.
4) Historic value. The first FALL ever recorded in Peru.
5) First fall ever to cause underground spring water to boil.
6)"HAMMER" The meteorite did damage to something man made; it hit and penetrated a  roof.
7) Witnessed fall seen by dozens of people.
8) Had a very bad odor. Only a few others known to smell bad, one of which is Murchison.
9) Made people sick after inhaling the air but, quickly subsided.
10) first to ever Cause a huge crater without being an Iron variety meteorite fall.
11)fall  killed a bull Llama and a sheep.
12)H4/5 chondrite are well known but this has unusual shock features of note.
13) Limited amount of material available for sale.
14)Loud detonation scaring lots of people.
15) research continues.
16) Shattered windows in local health center 1 Kilometer away.
17) Highest altitude that a meteorite has ever been found.
18) Hit at such a high altitude that it may have still been smoking.
19) Mike Farmer nearly caused an international incident. Yeah! Made lots of press.
20) Very friable and crumbles easy.
21) First actual seismic recording of a terrestrial meteorite impact  registered a 1.5 tremor on the seismic equipment which is equal to 4.9 tons of dynamite according to Ronald Woodman .
22) First fall ever to knock down a person. The man was  standing 300 meters away.
23) Good chance that if any material is still in the crater but by now is meteorite soup ( now four weeks old).
24) Only fall in recent history where officials told the public that it was harmful and that they should discard and  throw away the meteorites.
25) Crater resembles craters on the Moon. Tycho and Copernicus as noted by Bernd Pauli.

Excellent space-detective work, especially in figuring out what initial reports were credible, and which weren't. It sure looked strange -- one early theory even suggested it was an off-course Peruvian army Scud missile test -- and it did fall in a highly-coincidental area known for geothermal activity. Kudos to Boyle for providing the follow-up instead of just, like most of the rest of the news media, losing interest and letting the story fade -- and our curiosity go unsatisfied. Thanks!

Wow.  The skeptics were wrong again?  I am shocked——SHOCKED I say.  They had this one all figured out.  How could these brave Knights of the Order of Reason POSSIBLY have been wrong?

I believe that a "few" skeptics believed that it was possibly a gas explosion, and that until further evidence was gathered, something other than a meteor impact may have caused the explosion given the claims of illness and the smell.  As evidence mounted that a meteor had indeed caused the events, those few skeptics accepted the evidence.  I fear that a lot of people don't understand that respectable skeptics are open to many possibilities until evidence really does narrow down the scope.  That is the responsible thing to do until evidence supports a specific conclusion.  If those persons that said the explosion was caused by a underground gas explosion and insisted that they were correct and that they were not interested in seeing the evidence, then they were not true skeptics. No rational person believes in something in opposition to all the evidence.  In that light, true  skeptics were not wrong -- their initial hypothesis was not validated.

If you study the "crossed polarized-light" image of a section of the Desaguadero Meteorite, two things are immediately obvious by inspection:

(1) There are a lot of multicolored sparkly things.

AND

(2) The caricatured face of noted comedian Jack Benny is clearly visible in the center of the multicolored sparkly things.

Based on this surprising evidence, there can be no doubt that the aliens from outer space, who at this very moment are circling our planet in low-Earth orbit since they have lost the mirror matter that powers their popcorn maker and cannot make a Jiffy Jump without it, are sending us an indisputable message, although what the message might be is unclear at present.

If you explore the various links in this very fascinating series of Cosmic Log reports, you will learn more information about this ongoing event, some of which is more than a tiny bit curious, especially when you observe that there are no traditionally dressed Peruvian persons in the background of the crater as seen inthe particular photograph where meteorite hunter Michael Farmer is shown in the foreground just in front of the outer edge of the crater.  

In fact, it appears that there are a lot of other people but  no traditionally dressed Peruvian persons, which is a bit odd, really, because one never finds photographs of Peru without also finding a few traditionally dressed Peruvian persons, since this is the generally accepted way of documenting evidence of being in Peru.

Another odd bit of information is that nobody is reporting taking samples of the liquid in the crater, even though it is something that a bright elementary school science student would know to do, just because it might provide clues to what is beneath the surface of the tiny pond that now fills the center of the crater.  

Did anyone get a long pole or some string and a lead weight to determine how deep the crater is?

Why is this not reported in the news?

More importantly, why is none of this reported anywhere in much detail (other than in the Cosmic Log, of course)?

If, as is being speculated, the meteorite weighs as much as 10 tons (which is approximately the weight of 10 classic Volkswagen "Beetles"), then should this not be front page news?

How often does this happen?  

Considering that the last somewhat recently and widely reported possible meteorite event later was confirmed to be a part of a wood chipper which was hurled at high velocity perhaps as much as a city block before crashing through the roof of a nearby home, where it soon garnered the attention of a virtual festival of researchers and scientists, what is the logic when something equivalent to 10 Volkswagens blasts through the atmosphere and virtually terrorizes a town for several days,  but there is little mention of it?

And another thing . . .

Based entirely on a basic but solid understanding of mathematics and physics, it certainly appears that an object weighing 10 tons should create a bigger crater, unless the object is very small (which introduces more questions than answers).  

Closer examination of the aforementioned crater photograph reveals that the meteorite certainly appears to have been on a virtually perpendicular trajectory, in effect falling directly downward rather than traveling in any type of acute or obtuse trajectory, since the crater appears to be nearly a perfect circle rather than an elipse:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/10/10/406411.aspx

Since it is obvious in the photograph that meteorite hunter Michael Farmer is kneeling behind a  small cluster of rocks, were any samples of the rocks collected toward the goal of comparing them to the meteorite samples?

If not, then why?  

And if the meteorite is a chrondite, one must wonder how large a diamond weighing several tons might be (since it does not require a slide rule to connect the dots provided in the descriptive name "carbonaceous chrondite").

Considering that the specific gravity of diamond is 3.52, after doing a bit of simple arithmetic with the help of an online water weight unit converter, it just so happens that a diamond approximately the volume of one cubic yard weighs 3 tons, whatever this might suggest (noting that the specific gravity of diamond is approximately half the specific gravity of cast iron and just over one-third the specific gravity of lead).

Basically, as the crater photograph clearly shows, it is not a big hole, which tends to suggest that if the object which made the crater weighs as much as 10 tons, then the object probably is not very big (which tends to suggest it is more dense than popcorn).

Is it possible that the crater is so small, because it was made by an object which primarily is composed of a strange blend of mirror matter and popcorn?

Until someone looks and does the science, it certainly is possible (if not likely), because common sense strongly suggests that 10 Volkswagens slamming into the Earth at hypersonic speed should make a really big hole in the ground.

Thanks!

Great story.  Thanks for the follow-up on this intriguing incident.

I would like to correct a few entries that meteoritemax listed.

#4 - This is not the first fall in Peru, many many falls have been recorded. A much larger fall with a seismically recorded 4.0 event. The Aplao fall in 2004. I know because I found the crater for that one.

Go to Google search and type "meteorito aplao"

#11 - Unconfirmed

#21 - The Institute that Dr. Woodman works at Institute Geophysical Peru (IGP) recorded the Aplao fall on 7 seismic stations on the PeruNet. I know because I helped them calibrate there equipment by giving them the exact coordinates of the crater. I also made a presentation to a group of scientists working there. I have the seismic data from the stations.

#23 - Unconfirmed but believed the main mass is buried more than 10 meters under the bottom of the crater in soft mud close to freezing temperatures. Oxidation and out-gassing might be protected for awhile.

Additionally, the crater is in the process of being protected with a 100 sq. meter heavy gauge plastic cover that I purchased and gave to the people of Desaguadero.

Studies are underway to determine the best method to extract the main mass. Imagine trying to extract a 5 - 10 ton mass buried in mud. This could be extremely dangerous. The only way I can see is to continually reinforced the hole with concrete while digging. I'm certain that the Peruvian mining engineers will devise a solid plan.

Randall

http://www.correoperu.com.pe/correosur/puno/nota.php?id=20085

Randall Gregory

THe complete story for the Aplao event can be found at:

http://www.nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/
lofiversion/index.php/t6757.html

It is true! The universe is really a very boring place filled with nothing but ordinary, boring rocks and ordinary, boring planets and stars and quasars and black holes and pulsars and moons and dark matter and of course, various meteors, asteroids and comets.
Go back to your homes, return to your jobs, attend your wars, read (and believe) your media, and donate to your politicians. Nothing happening here, move along.

Just curious... why do you ask for comments and wait days (if ever) before publishing any of them? Is MSNBC short on help? Are the thoughts of your readers that unimportant to you? 'Time and space constraints' for a media giant? Mnay bloggers pay less than $25 a month for a website and still manage to publish the comments in the hundreds!

This is just sad.

Sorry, Mike ... we do run a tight ship around here, and I'm generally the only guy approving messages. So when I'm out of the office (as I have been for the past few days), the message approval is a bit spottier. It might help if I let people know I'm out (I filed the above item and this comment during breaks in the action, using my just-purchased aircard) ... and if I deputize someone else in our overworked office to approve messages every once in a while.  :-)

You're right also that not every message gets approved. I would say 10 percent of messages are not approved, mostly because they're spam, or empty messages, or they don't conform with the rules (e.g., they're too off topic or go too far in attacking others).

A correction to Mr. Hupp (meteoritemax). This is not Peru's first witnessed, seismic recorded, meteorite fall. There have been numerous prior falls, unfortunatly they never make it past the local news.
The full story of the Feb 2,2004 Aplao fall can be found at: http://www.nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/
lofiversion/index.php/t6757.html


Randall

Yes, I was also wondering why my comments have not appeared lately.

There is only one other known and accepted meteorite from Peru, an Iron meteorite called Tambo Quemado.
All things Randall Gregory refers to are unconfirmed, thus, do not exist so you can not call them meteorites.
His Aplao story is garbage. He found some old bomb craters, already been proven not to be meteorites. [...]
Carancas is Peru's second confirmed meteorite.
The crater issue is what makes this meteorite so special.

How come nobody connects dots?  The name of the nearest village means "Smelly Water" (more or less), the crater penetrated only a few feet before exposing a water table quite close to the surface. Heating up that water could be expected to cause wafts of methane impregnated gas, plus sulphur compounds, from decomposing vegetable matter (the stench of bore water in my area can be very offensive). So all in all I see a rather accountable connection between boiling mud and stench.

I have to say, a ten ton friable rock would be sitting on the surface of a possibly larger crater! Perhaps outer parts of the meteorite, incandescing as it rocked eathwards, became friable? Perhaps all the 'scientific' observations so far have about as much credibility as the shouts of the local Shaman?

I would expect perhaps a few hundred pounds of something VERY solid impacting and mainly self-consuming on impact. No doubt something did penetrate and possibly down to 10 meters but if there is ten tons of anything down there it's 10 tons of mud.

Also, the hysteria and medical compliants in Peru would be nothing compared to what would be reported if this thing popped in the middle of Manhattan. Your average US citizen is apt to litigate on the basis of his pet dog going into a panic! Ten VDubs penetrating the water table in his backyard would be more than a welcome interruption to the calm mayhem of NYC!

Lovely article, btw. :)

After doing a bit of quick research on meteorite craters, it appears that virtually all impact craters are nearly perfect circles, with the exception being craters resulting from very shallow angle impacts.  The logic for this is based on the idea that the release of kinetic energy resulting in the explosion which creates the impact crater nearly instantly is the defining aspect, rather than the angle of impact.  

Yet, judging by the photograph of the smoke trail left by the meteorite, one might suggest that the impact angle primarily was vertical, perhaps being in the general range of 75 to 105 degrees (with 90 degrees being perpendicular to the ground).  However, the idea that the angle of impact is not so important might be based more on what happens with larger rather than smaller meteorites, although this thought is mostly the consequence of pondering the mechanics of skipping a rock across the top of a pond.

Since there is a fascinating calculator for computing the results of meteorite impacts, it appears that the idea of the primary remnant of the Desaguadero Meteorite being a diamond approximately one cubic meter in volume is somewhat plausible, at least in the sense of the general density of the material mapping to three tons per cubic meter (noting that the reference to a classic Volkswagen "Beetle" uses English rather than metric values, because this classic vehicle weighs nearly exactly 2,000 pounds, depending on the pre-1968 year one uses as a reference point):

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/tekton/crater_c.html

Using the following input values, the calculator estimates the rim-to-rim diameter of the impact crater will be 9.92 meters:

Projectile Diameter:  1 meter
Projectile Distance:  3000 kg per cubic meter
Impact Velocity: 17 km/sec
Impact Angle:  75 degrees
Target Density:  1500 kg per cubic meter
Acceleration of Gravity:  9.8 meters per second squared
Target Type:  competent rock or saturated soil

If you try different input values, it is easy to discover that creating an impact crater with a diameter of 13 meters is not so easy to do when the projectile weighs 10 tons unless the object is nearly twice as dense than iron and has a volume of 0.5 cubic meters, although this might be due to the algorithm for the calculator doing a bit of rounding for smaller sized projectiles (hence is less precise for smaller diameter meteorites).  Stated another way, it appears that the defining characteristic for smaller impact crater diameters is the diameter of the meteorite, itself, with the secondary characteristic mapping to the density of the meteorite, and the consequence being that having a meteorite weighing 10 tons embedded in an impact crater having a rim-to-rim diameter of 13 meters requires that the embedded meteorite be very dense (specifically, denser than iron).

Intuition is not always the best predictor, but it does appear to suggest that the remnant of the Desaguadero Meteorite is approximately 0.5 cubic meters, which is approximately the size of a beach ball.

Nevertheless, the idea that it might be possible for there to be remnants of mirror matter or anti-matter in certain types of impact craters continues to be intriguing, and there is something curious about the Desaguadero Meteorite crater which makes it appear to be a bit illogical (perhaps with the illogical aspect being the generally observed clarity for such a small crater not mapping to something which makes such great sense, really).

Stated another way, the Desaguadero Meteorite crater looks like what one might expect to result from firing a somewhat large canon ball at the Earth--perhaps encrusted with less dense rock and having an overall diameter of several meters but a dense inner diameter of approximately 0.5 cubic meters when it first entered the Earth's atmosphere--from space, which is more than a bit strange, really, noting that this is based on the presumption that a canon ball would not leave much of a smoke trail (hence the outer encrustation, which would leave a smoke trail).

It certainly will be fascinating to learn what is in the crater!

Thanks!

Very true. The stones collected have not been positively identified as meteorites. Work is still in progress and testing incomplete.

Mr. Farmer has absolutely no credibility in regard to Aplao. He alone has labeled it a bomb crater. I ask Mr. Farmer to provide proof to his claim. Again, the full story on the Aplao event can be found at:

http://www.nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/
lofiversion/index.php/t6757.html

Thank you for reading.

Folks, I'm feeling as if we're getting too much into a back-and-forth, Farmer vs. Gregory (plus John Doe) argument here. I don't think this is the appropriate forum for volleys of accusations and counteraccusations... I'm just not in a position to check all this out and am starting to feel like this item is getting caught in the crossfire. It's fine if you want to have a more general discussion about meteorite collection, or if folks want to link to other forums where people can duel with each other in the comment space ... but I'm going to be a bit more rigorous in not approving or editing comments that attack other commenters. And although John Doe would like me to, I don't want to turn this into a catalog of the sins of specific rock collectors. Hope you understand ... and again, feel free to send along links to other places where you are pleading your case.

Fuller, the skeptics' "initial hypothesis was not validated"???  Sounds like an evasive way to say that what they believed was false.

And what is the responsible thing to do?  Make up a totally false explanation because it sounds less strange?  False is false.

I find it interesting, and quite revealing, that those skeptics thought it was necessary to challenge the initial reports AT ALL.

www.keyhoereport.com/

Alan, thank you for your answer, and for being a good sport. I agree this mud slinging is tedious journalism, and imagine that your editorial directors and perhaps the legal department were not willing to prioritise this developing story.

Do you know where I might find a more interested forum in which to explore the establishment of international standards protecting the materials that fall from space for appropriate scientific and socio-economic groups?

Best Regards,

'John'

This Peru thing reminded me of a book I recently read entitled MICROBE by Bill Clem. It details the events surrounding a bacteria-carrying meteor that hit Ft. Miles, Delaware in 1947 killing several dozen soldiers and the Army's subsequent cover-up. It's supposed to be fiction, but if you check out the historical facts, it seems more like narrative non-fiction. You decide. Anyway, great book. I got mine off Amazon

Duncan, I myself did not find the hypothesis that the explosion was caused by natural gas to by plausable, but it was not wrong of the skeptics to come up with other causes of the event.  Sorry, but without challenge, many false assumptions would be excepted without testing.  It is necessary to challenge initial reports... until testing is complete one must keep an open mind to cause.  And yes, that specific hypothesis is probably "false."  My point was that the skeptics themselves were not "wrong" to raise the questions they did... they came up with a valid, testable hypothesis which does not seem to be supported by the evidence that has surfaced since.  Without skepticism, many assumptions would be accepted on blind faith only without closer examination.  That is why we have the scientific method.

The Aplao meteorite is Peru's 3rd known meteorite fall. There have been several others but never made it out of the local papers. Scientific estimates on the number of meteorite falls show that South America should receive close to 360 meteorite falls per year or almost one per day. In the last 200 years the meteorite recovery rate has been a dismal .01% off all falls.

If anyone would be interested in finding out more about this fantastic meteorite and fall, I welcome you to visit:

http://illinoismeteorites.com/yabb/YaBB.pl

There is also a contest running to win a Carancas Meteorite Scientific Package. Open to all.

Is it possible that part of the reason for the large crater could be due to hydrothermal shock? If the meteorite penetrated to the water table, and the meteor was hot enough, water expands 1700 times its volume when turned to steam and this would have happened instantly.

A big rock came out of the sky and landed in Peru. It may have survived when most thought it would burn up on entry. It was a common form of meteorite. some tried to blame the thing on a gas explosion in the ground, but it was actually a meteorite. That's all there is to tell.

Oh, Man. One of the reasons I keep reading the comments to see supposedly adult scientists going at each other like on the 3rd grade playground. Same thing happens in the hallways of big universities. It's all very entertaining. These people do the work that they do because they're not reasonable people to begin with.

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