Object Studies
I promised an explanation as to why lately I’ve been wandering the strange halls of the Natural History Building. This (above) is it. A shoe-sized very heavy piece of semi-magnetic Nickel-Iron rock that I believe may be a meteorite, and around 4.4 billion years old.
I’ve mentioned this before. Searching through the warren of rooms and hallways undeneath my Grandfather’s apartment building, this was what I was looking for. Though I was beginning to think I’d never find it, a few weeks ago an expedition into the basement recovered, at last, the meteorite I remember my grandfather showing me years ago.
And although he had a habit of making up stories, I’m pretty sure that he himself believed this one. I found the meteorite in a brown paper bag with notes on it from when my grandfather took the meteorite to the Field Museum to have it identified. The results seem to have been inconclusive, with the museum rep telling my grandfather that the musuem would need to take posession of the thing before cutting it up to discern its true point of origin.
So I arranged last week to take the meteorite in tomorrow and meet with an emeritus professor of geology, who takes an interest in identifying meteorites. I must say, however, that the odds of my piece of iron actually being a meteorite seem small, given that it has some characteristics that are atypical of most meteorites. It has some bubble-like cavities that suggest a terrestrial origin. It has sharp edges that are usually more rounded in meteorties that have endured atmospheric descent. And I don’t think it exhibits the “fusion crust” that meteorites often have.
Yet (as a childhood space geek) I’m not prepared to decide that what I’ve got is a plaing old igneous rock, or a piece of industrial waste. There are meteories with irregular surfaces and even with bubble like structures. So we will tomorrow take this piece of cosmic mystery into the Geology department and await the crying of lot 49.
Any bets on what I’ve got? Does this meteor identification guide help? Or is it already clear enough to everyone that what I have is really a meteorwrong?
May 1st, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Where’d your grandfather find it?
I ask because as a child I went to the ghosttown of Fayette near Escanaba in the upper peninsula of Michigan. It had been a smelting town, and when the region was deforested and market for charcoal-fired iron dried up in 1891, the foundry closed. Not long after that, Fayette was left deserted.
Georgraphically, it lies between the lake and a (denuded) hardwood forest on an area of surface limestone deposits. Between all the sand, the limestone which paves the area, and the silvery patina the old wooden buldings have taken on, Fayette is very pale.
… which made it very easy to spot a chunk of iron lying on the ground. I took it — apparently, I’m the only person in a century to have considered it a worthy souvenir. It’s about an eigth of a cup in volume and very heavy.
I want yours to be a meteorite, because mine most certainly isn’t.
ps. I had to reload this page so that I wouldn’t have to type “boss” as the secret code. On May Day, even!
May 1st, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Funny you should mention it, because the rock was found, I think, in Northern Wisconsin. Probably in the eponymous Washburn County, WI. Just down the road from Duluth (and not too far from Fayette).
I took the heavy object to the lounge of the Geology department, where I met a friendly professor emeritus, who wasn’t exactly sure *what* the heavy object was, except for the fact that that it was not a meteorite.
His speculation—the same as yours (and mine)—was that it was some sort of iron-making artifact, although a little unusual for a piece of slag. He suggested I might take it to the Illinois geological survey if I were really curious. He spent several minutes describing the iron industry in Northern Wisconsin, and the fact that some smelting does indeed take place there, although not so much. Up there, you see, they mostly put iron on trains to send to Indiana and Michigan, from whence the empty trains are sent back up again loaded with coal, allowing them to do just a bit of small-scale smelting in Northern WI and the UP. My mysterious heavy object he suggested is, like yours, a relic of this industry.
And yet he wasn’t quite sure about this explanation—”That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” he concluded. So it could still, to my way of thinking, be just about anything. In any case, the most I’m willing to concede, given the hundred billion or years or so before the heat death of the universe, is that I have in my posession a strange heavy object that that isn’t a meteorite yet.
[p.s. - Since upgrading the other day to Wordpress 2.0, the CAPTCHA code doesn’t actually work. A May Day message about authority of “bosses”?]