The meteorite and the tornado
Published on May 9, 2007 at 1:10 pm.
3 Comments.
Filed under Uncategorized, meteors.
The news media pride themselves on accurate unbiased reporting of important events. Yeah, right. I’ll grant that they report on events. Those adjectives, though, …
An example came just a little while ago. Someone asked me about the meteorite that fell during the monster tornado that destroyed the town of Greensburg, Kansas. “Huh?” I asked, rather befuddled. Then, he went on to explain that he was listening to the news on the radio driving to campus this morning, and they were talking about how a giant meteorite had landed in the town during the tornado and that there was speculation that the meteorite had either caused or intensified the tornado. So, I stared at him in shock, not as his ignorance, because he was reporting what he had heard and was asking an astronomer since the news did not seem to make sense to him. Well, there is a good reason for that: the news source that he had listened to got the news WRONG. Imaging that.
So, let me set the story straight, in case this bad reporting gets spread further. First of all, there is a meteorite in the story. Only, it did not fall on May 4, 2007, when an EF5 tornado (from the Enhanced Fujita Scale) struck the town of Greensburg, Kansas, killing at least ten people, and destroying an estimated 90% of the buildings in the town, effectively wiping Greensburg off of the face of the Earth. Yes, there’s a meteorite in the story. But, instead of falling during the tornado, the meteorite fell about 10,000 years before the tornado struck! A 450 kilogram piece of the meteorite, having an insured value of $1,000,000 (probably far undervalued), was sitting in the town’s museum at the time, and for a while was unaccounted for. A couple of days later, it was found underneath the rubble of the museum.
The Brenham meteorite that had been displayed in the museum was a pallasite meteorite, discovered in 1949 on the Ellis Peck farm, located several miles east of Greenburg. The meteorite was reported found using a metal detector. The discoverer, H. Stockwell, hadn’t been just going around Kansas with a metal detector just to see what he might find. Rather, the Peck farm was the site of a rather small (15 meter diameter) heavily eroded impact crater, known alternately as the Brenham Crater or the Haviland Crater. Many meteorites contain iron and nickel, so he was looking to see what he could find. Some smaller meteorites had already been found in the area. What he found, though, was far larger than anyone else had found, a nearly 1000 pound meteorite buried a number of feet below the surface. It was promptly excavated, nicknamed “The Space Wanderer,” and taken to the Big Well Museum (Greensburg was also the home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest hand dug well). At the time, it was the largest meteorite of its type, though later larger once have been found (despite what the sign said in the Greensburg museum!).
The Brenham meteorite is a type of meteorite known as a pallasite. This is a type of stony-iron meteorite that has large olivine crystals embedded in an otherwise iron-nickel substrate. We have a slice of a pallasite meteorite here at my college, and I’ve included a photo of a representative pallasite here. 
There are a couple of alternate hypotheses about how these pallasites come to be. One idea is that they may be from the core-mantle boundary of a differentiated asteroid that was blasted apart in a titanic collision. Another hypothesis is that rather than originating at an asteroid’s core-mantle boundary, the pallasites may have been created by mixing of mantle and core materials during collision.
So, once the town is rebuilt, and the museum again opens, you might think of stopping off in Greensburg if you ever happen to be driving through southwestern Kansas. You can see the Big Well and the meteorite.
-Astroprof
(Images courtesy of (in order of appearance) RoadsideAmerica.com, Greensburg Chamber of Commerce, and Wikimedia.)
Seeking Solace on May 9, 2007 at 3:40 pm: 1
I also heard an account that the tornado carried the meteorite quite a distance. I cannot remember where I heard it. That does not seem right to me, given the size of the meteorite. But, then again that’s the media!
A Ler…-- Rastos de Luz on May 12, 2007 at 8:33 am: 2
[…] “The meteorite and the tornado“, no Astroprof’s Page; […]
joni on May 15, 2007 at 6:21 pm: 3
I enjoyed a good chuckle from this one. A meteorite being part of a tornado would have indeed made an interesting story! :o)
I hail from north of Greensburg. That meteorite, and the hand dug well next to it, are only two of the great things there.
Thanks again for this nice piece re: the meteorite.