The Stone Hunters

What If Meteorite Hit Earth Nearly With Speed Of Light.

The Campo del Cielo meteorite field where Gancedo was discovered translates to ‘field of heaven’ Credit: Ministerio de Gobierno/Facebook The second-largest meteorite ever found has been exhumed outside the small Argentinian town of Gancedo. The 30-tonne rock, named after the town, was discovered on September 10 and dug up by an excavation team which was shocked by its massive size. “While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 tonnes,” Astronomy Association of Chaco president Mario Vesconi said. It is believed to have crashed to earth about 4,000 years ago as part of an iron meteorite shower covering hundreds of square kilometres, 1,000km north-west of Buenos Aires at a site now known as Campo del Cielo. The original asteroid is estimated to have weighed about 600 tonnes and entered Earth’s atmosphere at 14,000 kilometres per hour, where it broke up into a shower of smaller meteorites, according to Scientific American. Ma...

"The Rose Of Asia" Elbaite Tourmaline Locality: Paprok, Afghanistan

Chyrsanthemum Rock Specimen Locality: Changsha, Hunan in China Photo Copyright © cobalt123/flickr

Controlled burning of surface oil slicks during the Deepwater Horizon event. Credit: David Valentine Due to the environmental disaster’s unprecedented scope, assessing the damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been a challenge. One unsolved puzzle is the location of 2 million barrels of submerged oil thought to be trapped in the deep ocean. UC Santa Barbara’s David Valentine and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) and UC Irvine have been able to describe the path the oil followed to create a footprint on the deep ocean floor. The findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For this study, the scientists used data from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The United States government estimates the Macondo well’s total discharge — from the spill in April 2010 until the well was capped that July — to be ...

A fountain of lava erupts from Hawaii’s Kilauea Iki crater on Dec. 5, 1959. Two rock samples from this eruption contain geochemical anomalies that could date back 4.5 billion years, shortly after the Earth first formed. Credit: USGS/J.P. Eaton Earth’s mantle is made of solid rock that nonetheless circulates slowly over millions of years. Some geologists assume that this slow circulation would have wiped away any geochemical traces of Earth’s early history long ago. But a new study led by University of Maryland geologists has found new evidence that could date back more than 4.5 billion years. The authors of the research paper, published April 7 in the journal Science, studied volcanic rocks that recently erupted from volcanoes in Hawaii and Samoa. The rocks contain surprising geochemical anomalies — the “fingerprints” of conditions that existed shortly after the planet formed. The researchers are not yet sure how Earth’s mantle preserved these anomalies. But ...