60,000 Year Old Giant Meteorite That Hit Odessa, Texas | Meteorite Men | Spark

visitors from outer space they crash land without warning and can lie buried for thousands of years oh my goodness jeff notkin and steve arnold live to unearth them they are oh yeah the meteorite men on this adventure jeff and steve secure access to one of america's famed sites the 62 000 year old odessa crater in west texas this is a protected site you can't just show up here and go is it okay if i hunt for meteorites no you can look at this buddy under a scorching sun they gear up with the latest in search equipment for big texas-sized iron space rocks there's anything left it's big and it's deep well we've got the stuff to find big and deep stuff if we found an iron meteorite out here weighing 300 pounds or more v worth a hundred thousand dollars it'll rock our world oh [Applause] [Music] morning odessa hot out there today could reach 105. watch out for them rattlesnakes this is one of the great meteorite sites in the world getting permission to come in and hunt is is really it's once in a lifetime odessa there it is i haven't seen that sign in many years [Music] jeff knocking and steve arnold are on a hunt for texas black gold of a different kind massive iron meteorites worth tens of thousands of dollars welcome to the springfield oh this is great for months they've sought special permits to hunt on the sacred ground of odessa's meteorite crater a whopping 550 feet across it's one of only two craters in the u.s where iron meteorites have been found the odessa crater was blasted out of the earth's surface about 62 000 years ago in a cataclysmic explosion three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed hiroshima we've got a big rock that probably stayed together for the most part until the very end there is a tremendous explosion at the time of impact which is believed to destroy most of the incoming mass the upheaval threw pieces all over and so we don't have little ones at one end and big ones at the other they're most likely all mixed in pretty haphazardly so we would expect them to be roughly in a circular pattern around the actual impact site the area where meteorites land is called a strewn field over the millennia the crater filled in leaving only a faint outline since first being recognized as a meteorite crater in the 1920s more than 1500 pieces have been taken by professionals and tourists the biggest close to 300 pounds all public hunting has been halted for years in an effort to preserve the area the coolest thing about being able to hunt at the odessa crater is that nobody else is allowed to this is a protected site you can't just show up here and go is it okay if i hunt for meteorites no you can you can't hunt in the crater or near it the local landowners don't want to be bothered they've had people poaching on their land for decades it's just not going to happen if we found an iron meteorite out here weighing 300 pounds or more the worth a hundred thousand dollars it'll rock our world a major discovery and there's an opportunity to maybe find a really big rock here we've been told if there's anything left it's big and it's deep well we've got the stuff to find big and deep stuff to increase their odds the guys have amassed over 500 000 worth of search gear a specialized military bomb detector that'll make me feel like i'm in a funeral march a magnetic radiometer that can pinpoint a piece of iron the size of a baseball 15 feet underground picking up the fence pretty good a mobile ground penetrating radar system now does this just go straight down um actually it makes a cone shape a cone shape and their low-tech pvc deep earth detecting sled all attached to the rockhound their high-tech multi-purpose amphibious vehicle that's where the target is i don't want you to put tire marks over the top of the target the hunt is on whoops and the only real question is where do they start there may be something here if it is it'd be it'd be quite quite big they've enlisted dr mark everett a prominent geophysicist who used a magnetic radiometer to create a precise map of the crater highlighting the tiniest changes in the earth's magnetic field caused by the violent impact what i plotted here is what i call the erratic readings each one of these could be caused by some little tiny object in the ground but there's something over here wow and these are the largest uh signals that we get so it could be something either side the fence line but that's an area we might want to investigate as well as these two areas down here armed with dr everett's research the guys decide the crater rim will be search area number one jeff wants to search the rim right away because of an old story he heard i'll hold that for you until you're ready for it steve was poo pooing me earlier but there's this legend or rumor that there's a very large iron mask that was detected just about at the extreme rim of the crater maybe back in the 50s because they're looking for big rocks they pull out the big gun the em63 military-grade unexploded ordnance detector this is a uxo detector primarily it's a it's a metal detector uxo is unexploded ordinance and it's designed for looking for for unexploded uh bombs genius the hope is that it can look deep to see what those marks on the map mean okay this is about the area where i think we get our largest magnetic readings somewhere in this area here the em63 transmits electromagnetic pulses deep into the ground when those pulses pass through a metallic object an electromagnetic force is induced in the target which allows the operator to read and record the magnetic signature which can reveal its size shape and orientation using the onboard computer here's our little line the readouts and what we're hoping for is a nice spike that goes up through one two three lines that's what mark told us to look out for got anything for me to dig not yet oh i got a little spike there let's try that again it was may have been right when i went over those little bushes there oh yeah okay i'm gonna back it up and try that again no this is uh one heavy rig this doesn't look like it it's really hot oh i'm a bit tired from pushing that do you want me to try and set that setting so you can see smaller objects with this we want to see the big one thanks okay wow these black boxes get really hot you should try pulling it instead of pushing it i know there's a big one out here i can i can feel it i like how you keep it on a straight line there jeff i'm ad-libbing all right i'm gonna give this one last whirl and then uh i'm gonna have to take this backpack off before i develop some sort of weird muscular problem [Music] to make the most of their time steve grabs his trusty personal metal detector a 2 500 piece of equipment that's found tens of thousands of dollars more worth of meteorites we'll give it a try at least until jeff finds us something bigger to dig on not quite as sophisticated as the em63 it operates on the same general principle a signal is sent out and if metal is detected the signal returns it's lower tech but can still work wonders [Music] while jeff bakes in the sun with the heavy equipment steve takes a chance near a working oil well here we go this looks like one wow look at that you wouldn't think that something with wheels would be this heavy oh jeff is gonna be so jealous okay funeral pace look this is a little sculpted odessa right here in the middle of the junk it's a cutie a little happy dance all right this is my first one for the day hopefully not the last steve has bagged the first find of the hunt but jeff is striking out in his search for big targets on the crater rim not a thing the fact that there are any pieces left of the meteorite that hit here about 62 000 years ago is the result of an extraordinary set of circumstances [Music] most bodies in space are sand sized maybe even smaller it's just a blip of a little streak those those happen all the time and don't create anything and then you have the the meteors that are large enough to create a crater but they're so big that they 100 destroy the rock then there's this really narrow amount a dozen maybe 15 known craters on the planet that are big enough to cause a crater big enough to destroy most of the rock but not all of it that's the category we're in here the the rarest of the rare [Music] the hunt for rare rocks moves to area number two the next concentric circle of the stream field this area is over the fence line and into private property they got exclusive permission to hunt the guys are hopeful that this area may produce since it's not been searched as extensively as the public land you can measure a certain distance from the crater and draw a line around it and go well we should hunt all of this all of this ground around the crater i got some here right away there is a hit in area two hey no fair i don't even have my detector set up yet how are you always not ready because time is precious temperatures are rising and the territory vast they trade the em63 for their more nimble metal detectors it's the metal detector song oh this is what it was i would guess that there are pieces probably up to two miles from the crater there could be a 100 or 200 there could be a 500 pound rock out here wow i've never heard it chatter like this yeah something's interfering jeff nothing in meteorite hunting is without challenge this is oil country and there's a lot more than dirt and rocks under this scrub brush that place is full of bullets this southwest heat is just brutal [Music] what's that oh come on really it was a big piece of wire it was just hidden in the in the brush there right on the top i must have sunstroke i tell you what it's over 100 degrees and it is still getting hot it is hot but the real danger is the field itself this land is crisscrossed with old and new oil and gas pipelines if it's an active oil pipe and you hit it hard with a pickaxe probably wouldn't be a good end to the day [Music] the explosion that blasted out the odessa crater about 62 000 years ago sent iron meteorites flying in a circular pattern possibly as far as a mile away yeah this looks exactly like ejective thrown out of the crater look at all these white fragments all around here so it would be kind of nice to find a meteorite next to it if the guys can unearth a big iron it would be well worth the dig the value of anything over a hundred pounds skyrockets into the tens of thousands of dollars we could use a backhoe we could win the backhoe bring the backhoe get the backhoe we need the battery i'll let you dig for a little bit we'll see how long it'll be before you call it tobacco yeah tobacco's a real bad idea isn't it jeff i caught something i can't even pudge hold on a second oh my goodness that looks very man-made to me oh it is a pipe but it's the end of it it's like just one piece oh man i go and get all excited you get a strong signal and you start thinking oh wow i really got something this time and then clunk and suddenly you see this very very round smooth meteorite which is in fact an oil pipe we won't even try to get it out no we can leave it for the next generation of meteorite hunters to dig up all right let's cover it back up [Music] oh well oh well when prospectors first started to hunt odessa it was widely believed there was a huge iron meteorite the size of a school bus buried under the crater holy hole batman in the 1940s texas university and the wpa the works project administration dug a 165-foot hole to find out once and for all if there was a giant space rock under the crater there was no meteorite it was just a very hard sedimentary conglomerate of iron sand and crystalline rocks the shaft was dug by hand they used your shovels and pigs eventually they hit bedrock at that point i'm sure they had jackhammers but it was still basically hand labor they got down to 165 feet and drifted a tunnel a fire in the 1950s destroyed the wooden support structure leaving just the bare dirt walls the possibility of a cave in makes it far too dangerous to enter the county poured this slab to cover it so people and livestock would not fall in it jeff and steve examine the strata of the exposed dirt shaft they're looking for even the slightest evidence of meteorites that might have been overlooked by previous generations holy cow they dug that by hand it's huge dropping the camera down the shaft they find exactly what everyone else has found nothing wow official it's returned from its uh journey to the center of the earth there is no giant meteorite at the bottom of the odessa crater most of the impactor was completely vaporized this is a very very high energy event the impact of an object that was many tens of feet across at very high velocity and most of the impactor was completely vaporized in the event [Music] dr minakshiwadwa is director of arizona state's world-renowned meteorite studies department she has extensively researched these astral travelers from their very origins to their impacts left on our planet the type of meteorite that landed is an iron meteorite and it is one of the asteroidal types of meteorites so these are thought to actually come from the core belt and eventually they made their way to the earth the first meteorite ever picked up was from the odessa meteor crater and it was a thrill to touch something that came from outer space tom rodman tom ryan this is the only significant meteorite crater anywhere in the united states that you can walk through and it's free it's a documented fact that odessa once had plenty of meteorites whether any big ones are left is the burning question [Music] i'm about worn out i could go for another whole day could you oh yeah easy to come back here and pick you up in the morning yeah that'd be fine we were out pushing it getting exhausted but we're trying to make the most of what we can and uh got that big signal we've got a really good target right there in the middle of the road and we don't usually dig in the road because it's usually trash but stranger things have happened i'll tell you what if you dig i'll keep your progress checked how's that you're doing very well thank you so that was a good trouble for do you think it might be thanks now the side road leading out of area number two has just become search area number three steve you want to double check my pin pointing on this [Music] wow perfect right right there in the center [Music] yep still there you must dig an even deeper hole hey hey what do we have a post hole digger we do actually [Music] we may have to come back in the morning we may but let's give it a couple more minutes what could be zing can be that big a zinc mine a big ball of tin foil oh great well i suppose you better fill it in since it's in the middle of the road and we'll come back tomorrow all right [Music] we do some crazy things but digging in the middle of the road after dark is probably not really a great idea even for us so we're gonna call it a day and come back tomorrow and we've got a backhoe tomorrow right yeah so the backhoe will get this out in five minutes and then we can discover if it is a real meteorite or as steve has predicted a big ball of tin foil [Music] the next morning the trusty backhoe hits area number three to fight through the rockhard desert road they're hoping for a big fine in an unlikely spot we brought the uh bobcat backhoe in to to make a quick job out of it this time no hole's gonna beat us [Music] you are right on the money okay a little bit more please you are spot on target does that sound like a crunch to you [Music] it's sticking to something oh that doesn't look very good not another pipeline god that's annoying another oil pipe another media wrong there's always these rumors that a strewn field's been hunted out and i don't believe it for a minute and then you come out here and you hunt and you hunt and you hunt and you hunt and you don't find anything and i'm starting to believe that this crew of old-timers i'm kind of thinking they've done a real good job they've searched three areas and found one little rock with a limited permit time becomes their enemy steve and jeff scramble to area number four a small crater 375 feet from the big one we think that this is actually an excavation pit that was dug in the 1940s to recover a very large meteorite there there's 10 holes out here that they dug and one of them had 600 pounds of meteorites or combined rocks that had disintegrated in in the holes steve and jeff truck in the smart cart ground penetrating radar system to search the pit like never before this system sends and receives electromagnetic waves within the subsurface of the earth ground penetrating radar or gpr uses pulses of high-powered radio waves to bounce off buried objects the system uses a transmitter to send high frequency radio waves up to 15 feet deep into the ground within fractions of a second the return signal is received and a rough image is displayed along with the exact coordinates and the depth of the object unlike the metal detectors we usually use which deliver an audio signature we get a visual return from the ground penetrating radar we actually get to look on a little panel that gives us a simplified snapshot of what exists beneath the surface it's fantastic and a skilled operator can analyze the return signal and say there's something hidden under the ground the search of area number four begins definitely got stuff going on here what'd you pick up a bullet shell um how about if i walk two lines this way okay and see how that works all right [Music] we got a change here looks like a vertical object i can run it over here again and check it out right here right in this area we found something you know you can you can hunt by sight you can hunt with a little thousand dollar metal detector you can hunt with a 3 000 metal detector or you can that's something there hey what you got i've got an anomaly on the screen and it's different from the rest of the surface oh yeah and it's uh look jeff right in front of us and you can see it right there all right what do we dig what do we bring in the backhoe it's hot and muggy i think we should bring in the little portable digger [Music] let's go deeper please and could you widen that a little bit on either side but i think we're right about here thanks the digging is a delicate process a mechanical ballet between machine and detectors with the goal to never damage the target that sounds like something maybe run your thing over i'm not getting anything it's still down there looks like there's a cave a hollow let's have them go a little deeper the thing that makes me feel that this is real is the the way the strata are all smashed up here as if there maybe there was a big impact separate from the main mass that punched into the ground here and was in a pit there was something there it's insane ferris on your yes it is i'm getting a nice green light wow it's still down there that's kind of encouraging that's really encouraging [Music] genuine schlitz beer content's 12 ounces made in the usa it's amazing actually with all the gear that we have but we we haven't really found anything significant but i think we were figuring that it would be it's relatively easy to come in here with better detectors and we'd just find all these pieces that they missed and that's just not happening time is running out and steve and jeff are desperate it's time to widen the net and they move out to the expansive area number five the next concentric circle turn the propellers on they're working cool just in case we run into a swamp oh okay well you never know in texas this is the hydra track or the rock hound as the guys call it it's an amphibious multi-purpose vehicle that has yet to meet a terrain it can't conquer well the hydro track is just about the best thing ever it's the perfect speed for dragging the big meteorite detector and the wide tracks mean we can go right over rough ground and it turns really easily as well they use the rockhound to tow a deep earth metal detector that steve custom designed it has 50 feet of coil strung through it and can detect meteorites 10 to 12 feet deep with a magnetic array this large they can cover a lot of ground in their quest for large pieces in simple terms the larger your coil the deeper into the ground the signal can travel so if we're looking for large targets that are very deeply buried we want to have a really big coil it's also possible the strewn field the area where the meteorites landed after the blast is larger than the early meteorite hunters thought so the detector is all assembled the hydrotrax ready to go and the last thing we do is the shovel test this is to make sure that the coil is working that's what we want to hear when we're zooming out there over the wildlands a nice shrill wine means a big iron target that said it [Music] oh yeah [Music] well that was a monster target could that be an oil pipe are we on anything it could be anything we uh just got a huge target over there real nice big loud shrieky wow if you if you walk along this line if it's a pipeline you'll get a continuous signal all the way that is a very long skinny meteorite she's going to say the same thing or maybe a pipeline all right you know the day's young we're still laughing about this at least we didn't have to dig that one 62 000 years ago this wasn't a laughing matter the power of the impact would have equaled the power of multiple nuclear bombs this event would have probably exterminated life within many miles in every direction probably by the shock wave and the heat generated by an explosion of that size it would be devastating explosion of that size it would be devastating if it happened in a major city thousands perhaps tens of thousands would be killed or injured so luckily for us these impacts don't happen too often and so far they've happened in relatively unpopulated areas or before there were people and not to mention if one of the meteorites landed on your head it would turn that'd be quite a good i think that steve arnold meteorite hunter's head in a jar in the smithsonian with a space rock embedded in it i like it [Music] after sweeping acres of new ground in area number five still nothing we found there's a really long pipe uh but other than that that's all so far the guys abandoned the rockhound and do some in-close hunting with their trusty metal detectors we'll get out here and get working so walk some of this off walk some of the frustration off and who knows [Music] from the pattern distribution of the old map that we looked at that pieces were found about a half a mile east in weston about a mile north so we should be maybe we're in a promising zone potential anyway while searching in area number five they spot something that appears oddly out of place this looks like what came out of the around the crater we're out here in the middle of brush and all of a sudden there's a big rock and some medium-sized pieces we've certainly seen this phenomenon at other craters notably meteor crater in arizona where large pieces of material called ejecta are actually thrown out of the crater by the force of the impact and uh would be logical to assume that there might be meteorites mixed in with the rocks that had been thrown out hopefully maybe yeah yeah as good a place as any actually let's find some with the sun setting their last shot is to try by hand in an area that turned up a number of meteorites in the past they're still holding out hope for the big one that got away holy cow that does sound good i like that sound a lot pinpoint it let's dig it sounds very metal oh boy look how soft this isn't it that looks unpleasantly man-made boy doesn't it what would a pipe be doing out here oh it's a drill bit no i don't know but it looks like a shower head wow whoa okay yeah a big bolt or something oh that's so unfair all that digging for that bolt that's not very nice that's three targets in about 30 feet and they were all junk after three long days and only one small find jeff and steve are about to declare this hunt one of their least successful we're finding a lot of scrap and pipelines and um bear cans beer cans yeah they will oh well yeah i wish we would have pulled an 800 pounder out of the ground but we gave it our best shot and you know if if there happened to have been one under where we were at we would have found it we didn't then as they pull out of the odessa crater area hey wait wait wait stop what stop did you see that the dark thing get out we're out we're we're three quarters a mile from the crater on the opposite side where they say there's nothing and it's all up and down the road look there's a meteorite check this or now jeff [Music] it's a pretty good one we're looking for all kinds of technology to get more advanced in ways and finding things and and jeff was driving i was like hey wait stop just a minute jeff oh look another one right here another one right here i got out and there's these little black magnetic pieces of rock look at this look at this look at this and it just keeps going we started looking and there's more and more oh oh oh oh i can't i can't leave this these may be fragments of a very large piece that exploded rain down over this area check this out jeff with your detector oh yeah he likes that one kind of piss eyes look at that this is the craziest thing in the world i'm going with the hypothesis that a meteorite maybe a 200 pounder got dug up dumped in a dump truck and the dump truck dumped it and the road grader just spread it out steve came up with a really good name he stubbed this fine avenue meteorite road yeah and this whole road seems to be graveled in meteorite shale what's shaleja so shale is a term that we use to describe a partially weathered iron meteorite some of the iron has terrestrialized it's still magnetic it's still a meteorite but it's not it's not quite as dense and heavy as a pure iron meteorite so they are rather interesting yeah it's from outer space we're not we're not picky and the race is on ladies and gentlemen oh mike steve you're encroaching on my territory i am i know who knows there there could be something really solid in here or there could just be more of these little ones but hey the sun's sun's going down so let's find someone now it helps if your back is to the sun because this direction everything has a shadow but from this direction anything that's dark it's not a shadow like this i was standing right on this one i couldn't see it from the other direction this direction it stands way out here's a bunch of little ones here i mean they just they just pop out steve it's it's really odd you just go if you go a few more feet down there there's just nothing it just stops all of a sudden this is the last piece that i found just over there the last piece why do i find that hard to believe i mean the furthest the field oh so jeff said they all stopped back there because he walked 20 feet and didn't find any i've already collected 10 or 15 pounds that's two or three thousand dollars this is crazy [Applause] there we go look at this there there might be something solid down inside there this is hefty how cool look at that steve the one i found is better than all of yours oh is it yeah it's really nice it's shaped like the pope's hat like the pope's hat yeah it's really interesting they just then they just stop they just they're just none down here and jeff thought it ended right there they're still here i wonder if there's anything off to the side of the road you want to check that out and remember watch out for rattlesnakes look at this buddy how many rattles does he have quite a few dozen of them maybe oh look at that he's like crawling right over this meteorite yeah there doesn't seem to be anything out here it's just pieces on the road and [Laughter] tin foil see on a day when you're not finding anything this is about the time of day you start getting really hungry when you're finding stuff you don't even notice it there's nothing down here yeah you're right jeff they probably stopped back there god did you hear that steve just said i was right about something you must have sunstroke yeah jeff nothing down here i've been told that there is nothing we've heard that before oh don't hunt there we even have colleagues that have said no don't go there there's nothing there usually because they know there is wow okay there's one there's one it's multi thousands of dollars all of those pieces and of course we get something that's really solid and you can cut open oh there's one ah and have shiny metal in it have a pattern in it then yeah those are going to be worth quite a bit more there is scientific value in proving that there are still meteorites and to the best of our knowledge no pieces had been found in that specific area now this is dangerous folks because if we put this on tv people are gonna just be flooding out here another one right here look at this that's a pretty impressive piece yeah and for in the middle of the road or anywhere well done i think i think there's something solid in there if we cut them open they're shiny the woodman statin structure's inside that's gonna be worth our trouble i like that one after just two hours on meteorite road the guys dig up an astonishing 65 pounds of meteorites worth at least 10 thousand dollars oh oh oh if half of the battle for the meteorite hunter is to find the rock yeah i can't believe this the other half is figuring out where it came from the odessa crater is one of the few sort of impact craters that you can see remnants of on the earth's surface still anything that we can find on the surface of the earth that can tell us something about impact processes in the past is of course valuable because we can learn something about the history the past history of impacts on our planet that way at arizona state university the department of meteorite sciences is well equipped to analyze meteorites inside these labs they not only determine their weight and size but more importantly their composition so this is a piece of the odessa iron meteorite and you can see here some of the hollows and some of the shapes that you see here it's a typical texture that you see in ein meteorites called the regulate texture or a thumb print texture and that happens as a result of the atmospheric interaction of the meteorite as it's sort of ablating in the atmosphere it's actually getting so hot on the exterior surface that it's actually vaporizing off some of the material on the surface and losing some mass as a result of that five hours east of the crater is a place that specializes in odessa irons the monarch meteorite gallery at tcu texas christian university dr art elman is the curator and an expert on these meteorites you guys want to see the odessa we have here in the collection that is just a little bit bigger than the ones we found but the ones we were looking for well this one's 120 pounds that's one of the nicer big pieces definitely nice but steve and jeff didn't come here just to admire the odessa irons they wanted to see how their rocks stacked up i need to see what you find out there should we compare and contrast well okay well those are those are nice ones because odessas are hard to find now i think it's very interesting how similar these are actually yeah same color similar shape surface kind of staining yeah patina oxidation so how confident are you that this is a real meteorite and then it's no destiny you're right number one the heft would tell me right away it's not a a normal earth rock especially being found a mile away from it proximity to the odessa crater is is the best argument right there without actually cutting it and doing some analysis on it and we need to cut it right across the middle here and cut it in two pieces and then look at that face and etch it there you go it looks like an odessa then dr art element knows there's only one way to authenticate that the meteorites jeff and steve found are odessa irons cutting a nice surface and see if it has nice vidmich state and figures that would be 99.9 percent that was needed of the 65 pounds of meteorite shale that steve and jeff collected a sample was shipped to asu for further studies [Music] lawrence garvey is the collections manager for the center of meteorite studies steve and jeff sample is sliced diced and polished then lawrence compares it with the odessa control sample he'll either declare steve and jeff's find as extraterrestrial rocks or just plain old texas gravel jeff and steve sent me the piece that they had found and then i took one one of the pieces from our collection just to look for any differences and similarities and it's fairly evident that they're both very very similar what is found is an iron meteorite it's called the 1ab complex it's a type of meteorite that has a large amount of silicate and and iron sulfide type inclusions in it one test will reveal if the two irons are a match it compares what is known as the cosmic fingerprint of an iron meteorite the vidman starting pattern this pattern is named after count alois von beck widmanstatten of vienna austria who in 1808 made the discovery with just a bunsen burner causing distinctive bands to appear here's a perfect example of an iron meteorite with a well-developed vitamin statin pattern and see these these nice bright linear features that we see are camosite the camera side is crystallized along the crystal planes of the high temperature form and the nickel that's expelled makes the um makes the what we call the tanite bands the darker bands in there count vidman staten's bunsen burner is no longer used but today the process is essentially the same it's performed with a high-speed diamond polishing and now we're going to put it in the night owl nitrile is nitric acid and methanol followed by a lovely acid bath that reveals the true widmanstaten pattern in the university sample okay here we see a classic section of the odessa meteorite this is from our collection we see a skeletonized schreiber's eye grain here that's this thing here but you see this black rim it's actually a shiny rim around it and that's koanite which is iron carbide here we see the nice coarse vitamin statin pattern and a characteristic feature of odessa is the the width of the camosite lamellae the camasite lamellae define the vitamin statin pattern so that's that width there and since this is calibrated we can tell that's about one that's about two that's about two so it's about it's just under two millimeters and the average width for the camisole the melee in odessa is about 1.7 so it's it's perfect it's as we expect now the rock that the guys found in the road faces the final test now the sample that jeff and steve sent has a well-developed vitamin starting pattern which is great the width of the i mean very developed well-developed camera size lamellae here and the width if we look at several i mean it's absolutely but it's the same as the as our odessa sample it's just under two millimeters so so we can say that the width of the of the canister mla are consistent with odessa hello this is jeff hi jeff hello lauren hey how are you doing i'm very good thanks hey i've got you i've got your meteorite sitting in front of me have you got some news for us this is a a beautiful example of the odessa meteorite really well developed before starting patterns did you have a chance to compare it to the odessa specimen in the reference collection as we would expect they're pretty much identical well no great surprise because we we found it in fairly close proximity to the crater but the whole thing was just so weird finding them in the road the bulk of the ime site is beautiful okay lawrence thanks for everything we really appreciate it and good luck with your future hunting thanks bye he said there's no weathering on the inside it's it's solid iron nickel all the way through and it's got a beautiful etched woodman satin pattern so we did all right on that one after all right let's go find one now yeah it makes you want to go find another only better news really would be to even find something else it's one thing to find a meteorite on the surface but to go to a crater a feature in the earth that's actually being gouged out of the ground by an enormous space rock crashing into the surface and then find meteorites the evidence of this cataclysmic impact it's a way that we can see how these rocks from outer space have actually changed the surface of the planet upon which we live

Channel: Spark

Views: 46,985

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary, meteorite men, meteorite hunting, spark documentary, meteor hunting, meteorite hunters, meteor hunters, finding meteorites, meteor man, how to hunt, meteor men, how to find meteorites, hunting for meteorites, ufo documentary, meteorite documentary, meteorite stone, metal detecting finds

Id: _hWZkbVq2W0

Length: 47min 34sec (2854 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021