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.