Scientists find meteorite pieces off Wash. coast
Scientists searching the seafloor off Washington state have found remnants of a meteor that lit up the Pacific Northwest sky and splashed down in March.
The Seattle Times reports that an eight-hour search at sea Monday yielded two tiny fragments of molten rock.
NASA’s curator of cosmic dust, Mark Fries, says the fragments must be examined more closely to confirm they came from the meteor but he’s optimistic. He says it’s the first intentional search for meteorites at sea.
Meteorites are bits of material left over from the formation of the solar system.
Associated Press
An eight-hour search of the seafloor off the Washington coast Monday yielded two tiny fragments of molten rock that scientists think are remnants of a meteor that exploded in a fireball and splashed down in March.
The fragments must be examined in more detail to confirm that they came from space, but the NASA scientist who led the hunt is optimistic.
“I could not be happier,” Mark Fries, NASA’s curator of cosmic dust, said Tuesday morning in a telephone briefing from the EV Nautilus, the nonprofit ship that conducted the search. “This has been the experience of a lifetime.”
If the discovery pans out, it will be the first time anyone has recovered fragments of a known meteor from the ocean bottom.
“This is the first intentional search for meteorites at sea,” Fries said.
The fireball and sonic boom created when the golf-cart-sized meteor slammed into the earth’s atmosphere the evening of March 7 were widely seen and heard along the Washington coast.
Fries estimated about 2 tons of space rock survived the fiery plunge. Using weather radar, he tracked the main impact zone to a half-mile-diameter swath about 16 miles off the coast.
The crew of the EV Nautilus used underwater robots equipped with a suction tube to slurp up samples of sediment. They also used a scoop and a magnetic wand fashioned for the mission to rake through the sediment for magnetic meteorites.
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The sample that contained the two fragments was the final one of the day, collected from a small pit on the seafloor.
“The seafloor was like a billiard table and there was this one little pit where it looked like something fell into it,” Fries said.
Crew members said the search was challenging because the seafloor at about 300 feet in depth was soft and muddy. Any large meteorite fragments would have sunk into the muck. Surface swells of up to 12 feet also roiled the water, reducing visibility.
The two bits of rock are about 2 to 3 millimeters in diameter. Fries said they are probably from the fusion crust — a molten layer like pottery glaze that forms in the blast-furnace heat of a meteor’s descent into the atmosphere.
Fries hopes to analyze the composition of the fragments. The meteor was unusual because it broke into several large fragments, indicating that it was made up of harder material than all of the other space rocks Fries has tracked.
“You can explain that anomaly if the meteor is of a different composition from the normal, most common types of meteors and now we have samples in hand to test that hypothesis,” he said.
The samples will be given to the Smithsonian Institution, which houses the national meteorite collection. But since they appear to be only bits of crust and not entire meteorites, they may not qualify for the official list of meteorites.
Meteorites are interesting to scientists because they are bits of material left over from the formation of the solar system.
When he gets back to his lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Fries plans to sift through the sediment samples again, looking for even smaller bits of space rock.
“I’m certain we’re going to find more than two little fragments,” he said.