2. A METEORITE FALLS IN THE WHEATLAND, U.S.A.
February 18, 1948, had been a pleasant day in northwestern Kansas and as the supper hour approached, the sky remained blue and cloudless. Shortly before 5:00 p.m., a few people were still out of doors. An eleven-year old girl was hanging up the last of the family wash on a high clothesline. In the late afternoon sunshine, a woman and her son were enjoying a walk around the back yard of their home on a large Kansas ranch. Outside his house, a ten-year old boy was playing basketball with friends. A veteran of World War II was loading fodder in a silo. In the feedlot of his ranch, a farmer was stacking hay. A filling station attendant was working outside at the pumps, grateful for a spell of milder winter weather.
Without warning, a large and very bright fireball streaked across the clear sky from southwest to northeast. Ominous-looking white smoke-clouds mushroomed up from points in the fireball’s path. Shortly after the fireball disappeared, loud explosions and rumbling sounds drove thousands of people out into the open. The whole astonishing luminous display was over in a few seconds, but the strange clouds and the frightening sounds that followed the fireball’s passage continued much longer.
Although startled by the brilliant fireball and the strange thundering noises, the young girl, whose face had been turned skyward as she hung up the clothes, noted very carefully where she had seen the fireball disappear behind the tallest building in her home town. (Her sighting was later of great value to field parties from the Institute of Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico.)
The woman and her son were amazed to see an angry, boiling white cloud tinged with red developing overhead in the blue sky and to hear strange whizzing noises in the air around them.
The boy playing basketball heard a peculiar whistling or hissing noise just as he was ready to shoot a basket and, on looking up, saw the ball of fire slanting earthward. (This boy’s report was of particular interest, since it related to an unusual type of “sound” that travels at the speed of light rather than at the velocity of ordinary soundwaves.)
As a cannonading louder than any the veteran had heard on the battlefields of Europe echoed over the rolling countryside, he went temporarily into a state of shock.
The farmer stacking hay heard several explosions, felt a violent air blast, and finally heard a solid object strike the ground “with a smack,” as he put it, “like a clod hitting the earth.” (Later, field searchers found that this man lived only about two and a half miles south of the point where the largest fragment of the meteorite fell.)
Shortly after the passage of the fireball, the filling station attendant felt the legs of his trousers flap as if he were standing in a high wind, although he was more than 11 miles distant from the actual path along which the fireball moved on its way to the earth.
As in the case of the Ussuri fall, which had occurred about a year earlier, farm animals, chickens, and dogs were terrified by the strange and noisy event. Cattle tried to run through a fence to escape the deafening racket. A fine pair of horses panicked and ran headlong into a narrow gully, the walls of which collapsed on them during their struggles. Chickens dashed for the henhouse, screeching and cackling all the way. A dog that feared lightning jumped behind a haystack and finally ran to his master in alarm.
Although the majority of the people did not see the fireball itself, they were driven out-of-doors by the violent concussions that followed its passage, and thus got out under the open sky in ample time to see several large, turbulent white clouds mushrooming far overhead. From these clouds, a thick powder or dust filtered down through the air and collected on the surfaces of stock ponds and water tanks.
Some people thought the peculiar clouds were similar to those produced by atom bomb explosions. Many suspected that a V-2 rocket had “run away” from the proving ground at White Sands, New Mexico. One man disagreed with the opinion of his friends that the military had been experimenting and declared that it was “the Lord who was experimenting!”
The February 18 meteorite fall caused great excitement throughout Kansas and Nebraska, and it was the chief topic of conversation for days among the residents of the many small farming communities along the western half of the Kansas-Nebraska state line.
The Ussuri fall was studied by Russian scientists exclusively, and we have of necessity given, in Chapter 1, a secondhand account of the fall and surveys the Russians made; but field parties from the Institute of Meteoritics conducted on-the-spot investigations of the Norton, Kansas fall. As we were members of several of these field parties, the story to follow is a firsthand report.
A little before 6:00 p.m. on February 18, word of the mysterious explosion centering near Norton, Kansas reached the Institute of Meteoritics, in Albuquerque, N. M., through the kind offices of Civil Air Patrol personnel. Since a number of early reports had described the incident as an airplane falling in flames, it was only natural that the Civil Air Patrol and similar groups would take an interest in the occurrence. At once, the staff of the Institute began to interview eyewitnesses of the event through Civil Air Patrol channels and by long distance telephone, telegram, and letter. Soon we had collected enough information to show clearly that a large meteorite fall had been responsible for the unusual light and sound effects that had startled the inhabitants of Kansas, Nebraska, and adjoining states.
By March 3, the Institute staff had made a first determination of the probable area of fall. The center of this oval-shaped, 8 by 4 mile area lay about 15 miles north-northwest of Norton, Kansas and nearly on the Kansas-Nebraska state line. The meteorite had fallen in a region of wheat fields, pasture lands, and widely scattered farm houses. The countryside there is open and gently rolling. The small creeks winding through shallow valleys are marked in spring and summer by narrow bands of low green trees and bushes. Many of the hillsides are covered with unplowed buffalo sod.
A fragment of the Norton fall is removed still imbedded in the tough buffalo grass sod into which it penetrated.
On March 24, a field party left the University of New Mexico to make a survey of this area. Unfortunately, Kansas blizzards can be as severe as any in Siberia, and although the scientists gathered many helpful reports from eyewitnesses of the fall, heavy snow and high winds seriously hampered the work. The information they collected, however, confirmed the accuracy of the Institute staff’s first determination of the probable area of fall.
Late in the spring, a farmer in this area found a “strange stone” on his land and held it for identification by the second Institute party. This strange stone—which smelled like sulfur and had metallic specks in it—was the first piece of the fallen meteorite to be recovered.
Scientists and farmers soon found many other fragments during systematic searches of the rolling farm and pasture lands. The fourteen-year-old boy who had been walking with his mother at the time of the fall discovered a 130-pound fragment of the meteorite in a pasture that had already been carefully searched by grown-up meteorite hunters! This find was one of the two largest fragments recovered from the entire fall. The landing place of this large piece was marked only by a small hole in the sod, but, on prodding into this hole, the boy struck something rather solid. He ran at once to tell the lady who owned the pastureland, and together they dug out the fine meteorite.
The Furnas County, Nebraska, stony meteorite in place at the bottom of its 10-foot “penetration funnel.”
This discovery brought interest in finding meteorites to a fever pitch, and it was soon possible to look in almost any direction and see farmers, or their wives and children, walking slowly across the fields and looking for meteorites.
Finally, in August, two farmers cutting wheat in a field just a short distance north of the Kansas-Nebraska state line found a deep hole when their tractor almost fell into it. They investigated and discovered that a very large fragment of the meteorite had buried itself deep in the ground.
Scientists from the University of Nebraska and the Institute of Meteoritics carefully excavated this huge meteorite. They found that the mass had plunged more than 10 feet into the earth. Quite by chance, its lower surface had come to rest in the ashes of a long-buried primitive cooking site.
The excavated meteorite looked and felt like a huge stone. Actually, it was stony in nature, but of a texture so fragile that it had to be wrapped in tissue paper, then in burlap, and finally covered with a thick coating of plaster of Paris before it could be lifted out of the ground. Those in charge of the removal of the meteorite borrowed this procedure from the paleontologists, who use it in the removal of fossil tusks and bones that otherwise would crumble away.
After the great meteorite had been raised out of the excavation, it was taken by truck to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque. There it was put on display beside the smaller 130-pound fragment found in May. By careful measurements, scientists determined the weight of the main mass to be approximately 2,360 pounds—a record weight for stony meteorites.[1] This remarkable meteorite, known as the Furnas County, Nebraska, stone, is now a prized item in the collection of the Institute of Meteoritics.
Field party proudly surrounds the Furnas stone in its protective “armor.”
As more and more finds were made in the area of fall, we accurately recorded their weights and mapped their locations. In this way, we could tell how the pieces of the meteorite had distributed themselves according to size and weight over the oval-shaped area. The smaller and lighter fragments were slowed down by air resistance and fell first, while the 2,360-pound mass carried on beyond them and came to earth at the farthest point along the direction of flight.
The staff of the Institute took many photographs of the meteorites that were found, of the impact funnel made by the largest mass, and of the excavation and removal of that giant stone. Some of these pictures were published in scientific journals, others in magazine and newspaper articles. A few of our best photographs are included in this chapter.
Although the light and sound effects that accompanied the Ussuri and Norton falls were similar, the meteorites recovered from them were not at all alike. The Ussuri specimens were masses of nickel-iron so malleable that on high-speed impact with hard rock they had held together and taken twisted and ragged shapes. But the Norton meteorites were very fragile stony masses, many of which went to pieces either in the air or when they struck the ground. Almost all of the recoveries made of this very rare type of stony meteorite were fragments, not whole specimens. They somewhat resembled pieces of a strange whitish mixture of chalk and crystalline limestone containing tiny specks and lumps of nickel-iron. Many specimens were covered wholly or in part by a shiny varnish-like fusion crust, varying in color from jet black through yellow to almost pure white.
The Furnas stone, protected by its “armor,” hangs suspended from the truck crane that raised it out of its deep “penetration funnel” in the earth.
The largest meteorite recovered from the Norton fall was the 2,360-pound mass that formed the deep impact funnel. The smallest Norton specimens, like their Ussuri counterparts, weighed no more than the thousandth part of a gram. Altogether, nearly a ton and a half of meteoritic material from the Norton fall was collected by the Institute. Other small fragments may remain undiscovered in the Kansas and Nebraska wheatlands, but, unfortunately, because of the soft and fragile nature of the material they are composed of, it is likely that they have now weathered away so completely that they are no longer recognizable as meteorites.
Our stories of the Ussuri and Norton meteorite falls show how hard scientists work themselves (and others!) to find meteorites. Therefore meteorites must be important. The two accounts given also make clear that investigators of meteorite falls are almost entirely dependent upon observations made by nonscientists.
Scientists investigating meteorite falls greatly appreciate the help given them by children and adults alike. Field parties are powerless without it, and we should like to encourage people of all ages to continue this type of valuable cooperation. In Chapter 7, we shall tell more about how the individual observer of a meteorite fall can make his report really count.
A close-up of the Furnas County stone, the largest stony meteorite ever recovered.