Meteorite Men | S03 E03 | Return to Whitecourt

meteorites alien invaders that race through our atmosphere and crash to earth without warning steve arnold and jeff notkin live to exhume these scientific wonders from deep space they are fantastic the meteorite men [Music] [Applause] on this expedition we're back steve and jeff lend the expertise to an important research project the goal to document and preserve evidence from an ancient meteorite strike that punched a giant hole in the canadian landscape yeah baby the earth is going on here parts of asteroids that broke up 4 billion years ago traveling at an astounding 17 000 miles per hour they careened to earth and remained buried until now it's a bit chilly for those of us that live in the desert but not as chilly as last time we were here steve arnold and jeff notkin are investigating a recently discovered meteorite crater near the town of white court in alberta canada they've got shovels when i was talking to brad on the phone and he said what kind of digging thing do you have and i said oh he's used my pick with a magnet he goes well that's not going to be much good up here eh and and apparently the average targets are 8 to 12 inches down and it's there's there's a so there's a soil layer and then it goes quickly into the clay and he said it's fairly hard digging so they've got long-handled steel shovels for us i didn't really want to bring them on the plane it's just wasted effort yeah all right and you know how to get there right sort of this could be fun are you ready hey are you ready are you ready to go back to white court are you ready are you ready yet yes are you excited i i hated leaving white i hated leaving white court last time white court is one of my favorite sites in the world in fact it's probably my favorite site on the entire planet how cool is this the guys first explored the location in 2010. oh ah holy cow when they unearthed five iron space rocks oh my god worth about ten thousand dollars way to go but it was oh it was so cold and we only had really only a few hours there is no site that we've been to that i want to go back to more than this one but this time the meteorite men are not hunting just for profit we have an opportunity to make a really valuable contribution to science not only do we have nice weather not only are we going to have an actual hunting window for a reasonable length of time but this time we have specific permission to hunt inside the protected zone what do you think of that whoa inside yes wow by special arrangement with our good friend dr chris hurd who awaits us upstairs with amazing new meteorite discoveries which you must see okay at the university of alberta in edmonton dr chris hurd has requested the guy's help recovering evidence from the white court impact crater jeff and steve have an incredible depth of knowledge of the best methods for looking for meteorites at the best tools to do it and so for them to come and apply their expertise to this particular area is a real treat dr chris dr chris heard's team has been investigating the crater since it was first discovered in 2007. he's the expert when it comes to everything meteoritic and specifically on the white court crater on earth visible craters are extremely rare one reason is that our atmosphere acts as a shield causing the vast majority of space rocks to burn up before they hit earth and the meteorites that do survive the cosmic voyage often don't generate enough energy to produce a crater it's only the rarest of the rare that survive the journey with enough momentum to puncture a hole in the landscape and even those are temporary earth's harsh and ever-changing environment erodes the visible record of most crater features [Music] so the white court crater is a unique and scientifically important site protected by law anyone found hunting inside the crater faces a 50 000 fine but outside it's open season and because meteorites are thrilling and remarkable and it's exciting to find them and they're worth a lot of money many people have been up here hunting this is a major blow to herds research rogue hunters are robbing him and the scientific community of critical data each fragment no matter how small is a key to understanding what happened when this meteorite smashed to earth in the process of the explosion to make the crater the original body which was something around three feet across ripped itself apart into shrapnel and spread that over this large area and there are hardly any examples of that worldwide so we're trying to figure out how that process happened both to make the crater and to produce this shrapnel field an emerging theory in the field of crater research is that the largest of these impact events may have sparked the conditions needed for the evolution of life about four billion years ago a volley of meteorites scarred the surface of our planet producing craters like those visible on our moon of these meteorites may have had already made organic molecules that were splashing down into warm pools of liquid water and that's what seeded life as we know it today it's an intriguing theory at the very least meteorites brought more organic material to the earth even if perhaps they didn't bring the very first ones right yeah yeah you've got something special in store for us well the deal is i got you access start working and go hunting and we get the meteorites here so we can study them such a unique opportunity to hunt at a site that is almost entirely undisturbed that we feel very special it's almost like walking on the moon we're going to do something that almost nobody else has been able to do before us there's an incredible amount of work to do enough to keep many people busy for many lifetimes and the thing about it is that these are fundamentally rocks from space they will tell you stuff about places that you can't really go there's so much excitement in the future is as more meteorites get found more stuff to work on new scientific questions to try to answer it's it's it's a growth industry steve and jeff make the two-hour drive from the university to white court but the crater itself remains obscured by lush forest the only way to get there is off-road that's a bit of a squeeze see ya white court the magnificent with nice weather and everything wow no kidding the guys first visited the crater in the dead of a white court winter but that meant they could easily see the depression that had been stamped into the canadian landscape wow 118 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep a change in the weather and you can't see the crater for the trees the guys meet back up with chris heard who's been collecting samples with his field team i knew it was going to be overgrown but i didn't expect it would look this different in the summer it's actually really scenic it's just going to be a bit harder for hunting have you guys learned more of the trajectory on where things and did it spew out in a certain direction more than others yeah we think it came in from the southwest and then the vast majority of the shrapnel is to the east well we've seen the sights i think we should find the rocks okay and he's saying they're that way so let's go find them the sides of the walls go up pretty sharp it's you're in like a little amphitheater it it's quite striking every time we embark upon a new expedition there is the brain power part how are we gonna play it what equipment are we gonna use for this expedition the guys are utilizing the latest and greatest space rock capturing metal detectors so jeff has introduced me to this new metal detector supposed to be better supposed to go deeper supposed to help us find more meteorites but it's not easy to get a delicate and sensitive detector through all of this undergrowth despite the thick brush steve zeros in on his target yeah 29.5 grams wow cool character on that one the greatest value of fines inside the crater's protected zone is in data not dollars and so far the guys are finding lots of samples around the crater rim chris asked us to follow some very specific steps when we find meteorites okay of course he wants the gps location of each one he also wants to know the depth at which it was found five inches the soil type and any other interesting details that we can record will help further the research project that was in clay and it was nose down [Music] bag them and tag them so that when it gets back in the laboratory they can take this data and put it together and find some really good information on how this thing came in how it exploded how these pieces were distributed all around this crater it's a lot of steps to go through but this is why we're out here it's tiny but every meteorite is part of the picture part of the story there is who's that guy chris are you grating papers down there why now guys you need to install like an escalator here how are you doing good we made it yeah glad you could good to see you again good to see you too nothing like having a meet and greet in the meteorite exactly come to the center of it all so so tell me what what exactly is it about working in a lab that's so appealing i don't know this is this is where it's at yeah this is where it's at hey we brought you something oh wow since you've been so gracious in educating us about meteorite science we thought with your permission we might educate you a little bit about using detectors yeah absolutely but uh yeah it's real lightweight very sensitive i think you'll like it and uh we figured that if we're gonna have the pleasure of your company out here we expect you to dig out some stuff as well we're not going to do all the work yeah there's some fun stuff it was either that or bring a shovel yeah one other takes us like that anyone can build all those so what are the rules for today well now you guys are here with your fancy metal detectors we can uh we can start filling in some of the the information between the crater itself and the edge of the the protected area before we start um specifics of how you would like each piece logged bagged any details depth that sort of thing is to record yeah i mean for larger pieces it'd be nice to actually excavate down sort of next to it and get a couple of photos of it in place before we actually pull it out because you get it you get a context of where it is with respect to the surface so we want to do that before we we pull those those out and then yeah basically just bag and tag them after that okay now we're putting the pieces of the puzzle together how many pieces were found how big was the original meteor that came in how much survived all this how it was distributed maybe what angle it came in and how it broke up i'm going to walk around the crater and i'm going to keep walking around until i find an area that's rich in meteorites and then i'm going to dig every one of them it's virgin territory enough to make any meteorite hunter's heart race this is gonna be like shooting fish in the barrel the meteorite men start their search just to the northeast of the impact site within the protected zone our first day was quite a surprise and not a happy one where steve and jeff are having trouble cutting through white quartz thick vegetation wow this is tough oh wow are we having fun yet perhaps this isn't going to be a slam dunk after all where are all the meteorites [Music] the protected zone is a protected zone there isn't supposed to be any hunting that's gone on in there so we were expecting that it would just be full of meteorites and we'd put our detectors down and get a signal right away but somehow that didn't happen the soil has terrestrial minerals that contain trace particles of different metals steve doesn't want these to set off his detector so he's fine-tuned the detector to zero in on iron only getting a few little sounds that according to the the reading on here they're not iron so i'm just going over them steve's optimism is waning he's starting to question his own strategy on one hand i'm drawn towards the clearings where it's easy on the other hand if somebody's been in here poaching that's probably where they would have been too so kind of leaning towards the little bit tougher areas to get to gotta keep pressing forward right now we're 61 meters from the center of the crater there should be stuff around here this is insane i thought we were gonna be finding them every five minutes where are they i don't know if we were in the wrong area or if our equipment wasn't properly calibrated or we were just having bad luck well i'm i'm not even getting any good signals but any doubts about finding space treasure is soon dismissed when they meet dr heard's field team oh it's the canadian champion meteorite hunting team hi comrades since presidency good to see you how are you they've set a new standard for meteorite research with their work up here at whitecourt i've found 550 meteorites out here just under 800. over 600 meteorites they're coming out to white court weekend after weekend and putting in hundreds thousands of hours of their own time to collect these specimens that's pretty much how it came out of the ground and no that's unbelievably fantastic i love the symmetry of it and it's good yeah but maybe this was on the outside of it yeah i wonder if the edge rock would fly farther than than the core part of the body that'd be a good question to ask a meteorologist or something if we could just find one that's the best thing i've seen all year that is really amazing it's the best thing you've seen yeah well maybe i mean you set your detector down and i'll show you maybe something even better okay well for for two minutes it was the best thing i've seen all year wow there's no doubt about it that's a nice piece and jen really treasures that but if you just step and look in the box here you didn't bring one that's so big it has to live wow well i think you guys should have pick them up and have a look at them okay are you ready some of their finds were meteor monsters oh come on wow this meteorite weighs in at 18 kilos just under 40 pounds i bow down and i worship you on the collector's market at 10 a gram that's a 180 000 space rock oh my god these are gorgeous rocks and this is my baby that one's just about 20 kilos wow look at that amazing rocks the price tag on this space rock 200 000 so how deep do you think we found that how far do you think that would drive in the ground i you know it it might have only dropped only six or eight inches deep two inches two inches that must have given you a heck of a signal when you went over it with the detector overloaded the detector yeah yeah no and it overloaded jen's detector when she found this one because this one was only six inches down wow we got to see kind of a little show and tell out here got our appetite wetted now we got to go make it happen jeff picks up his search on the northeast end of the crater that's one 15 yards away steve is on the lookout the meteorite men each have a target in their crosshairs about your 50 bucks that's the meteorite this is weird earth is going on here well where'd it go no wire this piece of water doing out here our expectation of finding many fabulous meteorites in a very short period of time was not fulfilled steve comes up with the idea that maybe no one ever thought to hunt by the warning sign along the crater's boundary [Music] oh this is too funny someone been tearing down signs and leaving nails around today the guys were not as lucky as they thought they'd be they have nothing worth showing dr heard by sundown it's quitting time just after dawn the next morning steve picks up right where he left off on the northeast end of the crater [Music] [Music] oh yeah this is too funny this is too funny every person that's walked off of that road to look into this whether they went in the crater or not walked over this meteorite right here oh i'm liking this one what if we go here the deeper i dig the more interesting it becomes is the holy cow oh yeah that's more like it every find jeff and steve make is a significant contribution to the research project dr chris hurd has set out to accurately measure the impact crater and he hopes to do it before poachers trespass and steal any more protected meteorites and this illustrates exactly why i'm here this is a dig hole from someone who is here poaching meteorites i know it's a poacher because the hole hasn't been filled in anyone who's ever been here working with the university have been required to fill in their holes whatever meteorite was here and it was probably a fairly nice piece because it's quite a large hole that date is lost forever because someone's stolen that piece and it'll continue to happen despite the sign up there that says fifty thousand dollar fine our mission is to find as many pieces as we can to aid in chris's research before they're stolen out of the reserve each find is a vital piece in herd's puzzle not only mapping the crater but posing one of the biggest questions of all where did we come from could it be possible that the building blocks for life hitched a ride to earth on a meteorite for life to begin the conditions must be just right you remember the story about goldilocks and the three bears she tasted the porridge that was too hot and the porridge that was too cold and then the porridge that was just right well the earth is in what's called the goldilocks zone just right here we have a bunsen burner representing our sun and liquid nitrogen at minus 320 degrees fahrenheit that represents the coldness of outer space if the earth formed and got too close to the sun where it was too hot it pops by by earth and if it is too far away in the cold of outer space it shrivels up and it's dead but if we put it back here in the goldilocks zone it's not too hot not too cold it's just right and because the earth is in the goldilocks zone we can have these pools of liquid water at the surface and then the right conditions for life to take hold and meteorite impacts would not only have heated the water they would have created unique underwater ecosystems that may have helped give rise to early life [Music] steve's digging a target for dr heard each find is a new link to white court's past there it is yeah that's awesome the depth helps scientists estimate the meteoroid speed just before impact let's pull it out wow then you can you can see where it's been wrapped up yeah yeah classic classic white court right there yep yep good find yeah all right dr herd will also put soil particles under a microscope to identify the chemical elements that made up the original meteoroid with that evidence he might be able to learn from where in our solar system the meteorite originated we find this buried soil and we found charcoal in it and that's how we we got the age on it the key to knowing exactly when a space rock punched a hole in the canadian forest is another destructive event a fire fragments of the meteorite have been found above a layer of soil holding evidence of fire carbon dating this material puts the crater at a relatively young 1100 years old but we don't know whether the charcoal is actually from the impact event or from a forest fire that just happened before yeah you started to get into it now this black stuff that's charcoal that was there before possibly started by the by the impact but we're not really sure that it had enough energy to do that oh good oh what's up oh iron most of the irons are black you can't see them when they come out where is it that's why the magnet's invaluable oh oh it's two tiny ones in one medium together it was a pretty strong signal and i was expecting a bigger target that was deep that little piece easily 12 inches jen newman a member of dr herd's research team joins the hunt there's a lot more ground to uncover in the protected zone and three detectors are better than one vegetation is pretty thick boy it's hard to get a good swing hey [Music] there you go wow that's awesome i'm not a total loser that sounds good it's right in here i just hit something all right there it is oh yeah i got to show steve this one i'm literally on the rim of the crater i mean it's right there that's a gorgeous one [Music] love it the location of each white court space rock indicates how the impact explosion distributed the shrapnel it flung out of the crater and landed here 1100 years ago and was then buried under soil jeff hasn't drifted far from his last find he's still on the crater's rim that sounds good we're right on the rim of the crater i do not want to do any damage here this is a protected site i don't want to be gouging huge holes in the side of the crater so i'm being particularly careful to make a small hole we normally wouldn't expect to find a whole lot of specimens on the rim typically the explosion will will throw them out away fling them away from the crater but some larger pieces were probably thrown straight up into the air and just fell back down deeper is good as we go deeper the chances that it's a large target increase so this is one instance when extra work actually makes me happy nice clean strong signal getting closer oh i just hit something hard i can't much if i can't move it that's a good sign oh holy cow that is a meteorite wow a large piece like this we wouldn't expect it to to have been thrown into the rim it may have been thrown way up into the air and just fallen back here magnet test look at that monster that's got to be three quarters of a kilo the specimen is a good sample for herd's research its size and location on the rim is a measure of the violent thrust of the meteorite's impact and at about 800 grams jeff's rock would get eight thousand dollars if it were available on the collector's market just over 11 inches down let's bag this i just need to do the gps that's a happy task blocking a finder that size the guys meet up on the south rim to check out their fines that's my best one so far jeff and steve have made several significant finds for herds research inside the protected zone but now they want to take the hunt outside the zone fines here will be of benefit to the project because whatever they recover may expand the known boundaries of the impact site i want to go outside the zone okay what do you think yeah steve and jeff are joined by members of the research team researcher brad newman leads them beyond the protected zone to an unmapped area nobody knows this area like you two so please lead on out here uh where we're gonna search is way far away from the crater outside the protected zone jeff steps off into the thick forest while steve and brad sift through an overgrown meadow wow you gonna dig that one are you yeah this is pretty tough terrain nope not in there it's in here somewhere there it is oh my goodness piece of wire a meteor wrong i've been getting spoiled this sounds better wow oh it's out well that's no good wire it's bad enough when it's a little piece then they start bundling themselves up yeah really being tricky we must be getting close yep they're throwing these decoys out at us i got a target over here that sounds really good [Music] there it is oh yeah more wire this is more wire we come to this hill and all we're finding is wire um on a positive note nobody's been here hunting before they would have already picked it up might be just below that log hey can you bring your detector over that's probably not a good thing [Music] there it is i see it right there it's right there sticking in oh there right there yeah yeah so check it out we had a target it was under the tree we moved the tree the target disappeared the screw screwed into the tree this looks like an old post that's not just a normal tree tree i don't think so well this was homesteaded back in the early 1900s sure they had cattle so they put up fence lines and okay well that would explain all the wire there might have been a fence around here maybe so their metal detectors don't differentiate between signals of pioneer junk and valuable space iron right there this is gonna be a meteorite it's gonna be one it's gonna be one this is gonna be a meteorite you're gonna see steve hey that's sounding kind of try right there a meteorite ladies and gentlemen yay congratulations wow that's the real deal the guys spread out to look for more of the real thing hey jeff i got one i hope you brought a shovel oh yeah baby i hear a lot of noise over there now that's what i'm talking about you betcha chunk i better go investigate how far are we from the crater 547 meters from the center from the center whoo hey you may have set the record what's going on over here let's oh super wow that's a good size 98 grams look at this one expanded the strewn field that's always fun exactly a strewn field is a section of ground where two or more meteorites of the same type have been recovered steve's latest find is noteworthy it pushes the known parameters of the white court site the guys regroup and head back to the protected zone oh yeah boy i was hit couldn't even see it it's not even an early arrangement pretty juicy piece [Music] on the western rim jeff has his ears on a target oh that sounds good it's right in here oh that's more like it oh yeah this is superb this is why i'm out here a classic piece of shrapnel it's it's really angular look at how the surface here is twisted and bent at that sharp point that is a piece of shrapnel that's been blown out of the crater following the impact that's why we do it beautiful shrapnel is key evidence for dr heard because it helps verify the path a fragment took at the time of impact this is one of the most precise and detailed mapping projects related to meteoritics that's ever been undertaken perhaps the most detailed and it's thrilling and also an honor to be part of it heard can then map the site with a higher degree of accuracy there's so much growth here there are a lot of fallen trees most pieces found here between 4 inches and 15 inches deep rust the telltale sign of an iron meteorite oh my goodness whoa look at that this is what it's all about right here wow it's hiding way underneath that route hey jeff i found a real nice one 191 grams that's a disgrace i have to go find a better one than that some serious bling serious bling best one ever for me steve may be adding data to a critical project but he's had less success keeping his gear organized despite jeff's best efforts this is a meteorite hunting kit that i designed and it's got this fantastic digital field scale magnet baggies pen a loop it's really everything that you need and i was so pleased with it that i made one for steve and i gave it to him as a present and then today he said well could i borrow some baggies and i said you must be kidding i just gave you this lovely kit that's got all these baggies in it and he said oh um yeah i lost the kit where'd i leave my shovel i'm gonna go get another shovel great where's my magnet i'm gonna go find my magnet i left home without my magnet again where's the magnet i seem to have misplaced my magnet oh no where'd my magnet go again the magnet's not attached i'm gonna run off and find a magnet wow this is overloading me oh well look at this did i lose my walkie um that's not good don't blame that on me ah i should have known as it gets towards the end of the day you've got this thing again i just want to find one more good one just one more good one and then i'll quit and it's getting late you see the sun going down crazy i'm having a heck of a time pinpointing this let's give that a try thanks why don't you help me with pinpointing if you don't mind since you're a master at that oh he's out that's it no it can't be that tiny they're little tiny fragments there we go there woohoo all right nice one after the guys bag and tag the last of their targets they pack up the hunt the last stop on this expedition is back at the university look at our bounty see what we brought in prepare to be amazed after all the effort steve and jeff put into collecting specimens for dr chris heard's research project they're eager to learn what the inside of a white court meteorite might reveal we had a cut and we've taken several slices off of it including this one here so this is the slice that came off of it heard shows the guys another sample after it's been polished so this surface is mirror smooth the meteorite's hidden structure is enhanced through etching i've mixed up 10 nitric acid the rest ethanol and we'll just brush it on the surface here the process reveals the crystalline design that only forms in outer space called the vidman statin pattern the vitamin cider pattern forms as the result of separating high nickel and low nickel metal from each other i imagine that you have already seen some etched specimens what is the bandwidth of white cork the band was about a millimeter on average so it's right in the medium octahedral range and what the acid does is that it attacks those the high nickel and low nickel metal differently to allow you to bring out that that pattern so it starts off as a very smooth polished mirror-like surface and ends up much more dull with the pattern reveal this is one of my favorite parts of meteorite science watching the etch pattern appear much like a photograph in a bathtub developer as the as the edge is working on the surface here it it makes each band slightly reflective from a different angle so sometimes you can come in with different colored lights at different angles on it and and they kind of mesh together and look really really cool because the individual lines will pop out in contrast with each other but it's mostly just different scales of gray as you can see guys here each we're starting to see each line each lamella as we call it each little width of camosite the the low nickel alloy start to appear and the significance of that is that it's representing very slow cooling and separation of the high nickel from the low nickel over a long period of time the crystal patterns in iron meteorites range from very coarse to extremely fine the thickness of the crystals in the pattern depends on the amount of nickel they contain and how slowly the metal cooled with this information scientists can estimate the size of the meteorite's parent body because larger asteroids cool more slowly than small ones so that really gives us insight into what was going on in the asteroid that this thing came from way back at the beginning of the solar system you start to see it come out oh wow that's nice what do you think guys fantastic so this tells the story of what the the asteroid went through as it formed in the early part when it cooled that's right dr heard estimates that in space the asteroid from which the white court mirite came cooled at around 50 degrees celsius per million years which means that asteroid was at least 30 miles across so there we go oh that's really gorgeous having seen what can be revealed through analysis it's time for the guys to present their samples wow this is quite the hall you guys what you guys is filled in a huge portion of that protected area and we have all shrapnel in the couple days that we were in the field we covered a lot of ground and we were able to really flesh out some of the blank spots on our map i love this one and it was nose down perfectly flat like this yeah yeah having an idea of just what carried further away and what didn't will will help us in in sort of piecing it all back back together again figuring out what happened how the even something about how the explosion took place we get an idea of the original mass that came in through the atmosphere and something about the timing of it something about the age of the impact crater itself the continuing study of meteorite craters across the globe helps researchers investigate the theory that life's raw ingredients may have originated in space we have evidence from some meteorites that have been studied that there are pre-made organic molecules it's not life itself but it's the right stuff for life to start in these meteorites and if those were falling to the earth four billion years ago into the warm pools at the surface they would have seeded the earth with with the things that we need for life knowing that these molecules formed in space suggests that some of the makings of dna were drifting down to early earth as life began to evolve the theory also has implications for extraterrestrial life because meteorites may have delivered these building blocks not only to earth but to other planets steve and jeff weren't only hunters on the white court team who found space treasure it's the veterans of the white court expedition brad newman and his daughter jen have also been gathering samples but they've been working the crater for weeks looks like you got some nice ones there steve and jeff are presented with a first-hand look at not only their contribution but all the space rocks recovered on this mission if you give me a little hand here we can unwrap be delighted it's an impressive hall sitting there on the table in front of me there's over 400 meteorites good lord this is fantastic you guys have done such a fantastic job it's just amazing to have all of this material to work on be years worth of work right here at this on this table excellent we'll take good care of them they've traveled a long way so that you could study them walking in seeing all the meteorites that that we found as a team was really encouraging made me really proud [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Geoff Notkin

Views: 11,222

Keywords: Meteorites, Meteorite Men, Aerolite, Geoff Notkin, asteroids, Geoffrey Notkin, Steve Arnold, space, Whitecourt Crater, meteorite hunting, University of Alberta, Chris Herd

Id: b6yibcfwXkk

Length: 48min 35sec (2915 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021