Update (May 13): I love my commenters! The meteorite has been found; in fact, it appears it was found well before I posted this entry. I didn’t find any info before I posted, but maybe my Google mojo had abandoned me. Anyway, this is good news, in a place that could really use some.
My in-laws live in Kansas, but I’ve never been to Greensburg (even though it’s about an hour from their house). Now if I go it’ll be different: it’s the town that was just literally destroyed by a tornado.
If there were any reason I’d go, it would have been to see their Pallasite meteorite, my favorite kind. They had a huge one that was found there, and in fact several have been found nearby in recent times. They have an ugly exterior, like slag, but when you cut them open they’re spectacular. They have translucent greenish-yellow olivine crystals lodged in an iron matrix, and if you cut them into thin slices and hold them up to the light, they are spectacular.
I just heard that the meteorite was lost in the tornado as well.
I’m not nearly as sad about that as I am over everything else that happened to those poor folks there, of course. I was slack-jawed looking at images from the town. That meteorite was the town’s prized possession, and it’s gone too. Man, that is an incredible bummer.
I have to add– when we’d drive through Kansas, we’d see signs for Greensburg, and they’d say that it was the home of the Pallasite meteorite and the world’s largest hand-dug well. We’d have to laugh, because a well seems like a silly thing to promote. Then, a long time later, I actually saw a pamphlet about the well. Wow. It really is big. It’s not the kind of thing I’d like to go visit, but then I can imagine a lot of people would see the meteorite and think it’s not a big deal because it’s just a rock. Different strokes. But I’m just saying — that’s a big well.
I imagine it’s still there. I also imagine they’ll find the meteorite, eventually. It’s about a meter across, and it’s almost solid iron, so it’s not likely to get too damaged (though I’d hate to see anything it might have hit at 400 kph inside that tornado). I hope they do. It sounds silly, maybe, but I bet if they find it it’ll cheer the town up a lot.
Tip of the Whipple shield to Thoughts from Kansas.
May 12th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
This AP article from 5/8 says it was found:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/05/07/national/a203936D83.DTL&type=printable
Amid the searching, a museum volunteer uncovered a missing 1,000-pound pallasite meteorite. One of the largest of its kind in the world, the meteorite is insured for $1 million. For decades, meteorite hunters from around the world have been drawn here to hunt for space rocks in the rich soil near here.
Museum volunteer Don Stimpson dug through the rubble Monday until he found the meteorite where it had been displayed, enclosed in glass at the Big Well museum and gift shop.
“I read reports the meteorite was gone, that it got sucked up by the tornado,” Stimpson said. “Unless you know what you are looking for, it looks like rubble.”
May 12th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
t
May 12th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation seems to show that an F5 tornado can indeed move a 1000 lbm pallasite meteorite if it is on a smooth surface.
May 13th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Phil, you are doing a very good job against “miracles” and such. Yet you wrote: “that is an incredible bummer”. As Tim G pointed out, it is just probability and statistics for a P5 tornado.
May 13th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Tim G,
Please share the calculation with an explanation for us?
May 13th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Read somewhere that the well is gone though. But at least the meteorite is found! And the museum volunteers prove their worth again! Yay!
May 13th, 2007 at 5:36 am
Glad they found it. I was worried it might have been blown into the well.
May 13th, 2007 at 5:43 am
I just got back from Greensburg yesterday (some convoluted set of inlaw relatives live(d) there (I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room-mate) so we went down to carry/clean over the day) and it was certainly considered “common knowledge” that the meteorite had been recovered, not that that always means it is so. Many there understandably looking for positives while sifting through the rubble we’re fond of mentioning that the well was in pretty decent shape (above ground building not, of course, but rebuildable) and that the meteorite had been recovered and hauled to safety.
It’s certainly a mess and a half, but fortunately they got very lead time, about 20-25 mins, and being mostly native kansans they don’t joke around when someone says it’s time to hit the shelters. They seem to be making solid progress too, still much chaos and no power/water/sewage but most roads are work (though understandably jammed with heavy equipment much of the time) and the place is crawling with people chip-chip-chipping away at everything, it’s like watching an anthill repair itself (if anthills had backloaders and army trucks).
May 13th, 2007 at 6:20 am
They found it? That’s a relief. A little sunshine in a probably very bad day.
May 13th, 2007 at 6:35 am
I spoke with Don Stimpson a few days ago, and indeed the meteorite has been found, and is in a secure location. Don is working with the mayor of Greensburg to figure out its future, both in the short and long term.
I instantly thought that the meteorite could be a great symbol to rally the state around the rebuilding of Greensburg, especially the museum that was its home. There are some ideas in the works long these lines, and I hope that an announcement will come out soon. It’s a great opportunity.
I’ve lived in Kansas almost 8 years now, and I’ve had a few very close calls with tornadoes, including an F-3. It was a few years ago, and I remember running into my basement with my pets on my farm in Wellington nearly every day that spring and fall. One tornado that year desvestated some nearby houses and farms, and people were almost killed – one neighbor’s dog was even thrown quite some distance! The twister cut a path through the trees that you could easily see. I even have a picture of me from that year that looks like a rope tornado, that was about a mile away, is coming off of my hand! I took that right before I ran into my basement. After seeing the devastation in Greensburg, I’m glad I wasn’t being overly cautious about those warnings.
May 13th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Glad they’re getting things under control. Shows what dedicated humans can accomplish w/o having to invoke mystical forces,,,
Sorry about the loss of life though.
Shaloam,,,
Gary 7
May 13th, 2007 at 7:32 am
I hadn’t heard about this humongous meteorite’s disappearance until now, but I sure am glad to hear that they were able to find it. It would be a shame to lose such an incredible specimen, especially when you consider the devastation that’s already taken place over there in Greensburg.
Brandon Watts
Criteo Evangelist
May 13th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Samuel Olivieria,
Thanks, but I cannot hold a candle to the great B.A. in his debunking powers.
Stupendous Man,
This was just a back-of-the-envelope “guesstimateâ€. I used the drag equation:
The magnitude of the force on a object due to high speed wind is equal to half the density of air times the cross sectional area times the drag coefficient times the speed of the air squared. If you use the kg-meter-second convention for your units, the answer will come out in newtons.
An F5 tornado has wind speeds of 261–318 mph. Three hundred miles per hour is about 135 meters per second. The density of air is around 1.3 kg per cubic meter. To estimate the cross-sectional area, I would first need to estimate the volume. The density of pallasite meteorites is about 4760 kg per cubic meter source so a 1000 lbm meteorite (450 kg) would have a volume of 0.095 cubic meters. We can guess the cross-sectional area of such a meteorite if we assume it to be a sphere. It would have a radius of 0.28 meters and therefore a cross sectional area of 0.25 square meters. I then guessed the drag coefficient, (spheres have 0.5 cars typically have around 0.3) I used 0.5. Plugging everything into the equation yields 1500 Newtons, which would be about a third of the weight of the meteorite.
I hope I didn’t make a mistake.
May 13th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
In other interesting meteorite news – turns out the meteorite that fell in NJ back in January isn’t really a meteorite at all. Turns out it was a piece of space junk – a hunk of stainless steel. Interesting, but not a meteorite…
May 13th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Did anybody check if that hunk of stainless steel was *not* a local system product? Now that would be cooler than a meteorite…
May 14th, 2007 at 4:34 am
Er, how is “bummer” a statement about the relative probability of an event? I think even skeptics can make a comment about whether something sucks when it happens, whether it was likely or not.
Not trying to be flamebait, but the idea bothered me a bit.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Funny thing to me in reading this post is that I distinctly recall seeing the meteorite in a wreckage picture in the newspaper. It was mentioned in the caption, too.
May 14th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
That piece of steel in NJ had Tony Soprano’s name on it- only three more episodes to try again. Rfff- splat- bada bing!
Jess Tauber