Author name: Martin Horejsi

“Then came a flash so brilliant that you could not see anything and it lit up everything bright as day. Then came the explosion after the light faded out, which shook the house with such force that the windows and dishes rattled.” -Emil Grigoleit of Hines Creek, Alberta, Canada. There are many shocking things about the fall of the Peace

Three-point-five-six meters is a pretty precise distance given cosmic measures yet it is the exact distance by which a half-kilo of space rock missed hitting pair of young boys in Noblesville, Indiana back in 1991. Image from NASA’s Exploring Meteorite Mysteries curriculum: On the last day of August, Brodie Spaulding and Brian Kenzie were standing on the Spaulding lawn when

2017 was an interesting year from any perspective, meteorites included. But then again meteorites are always interesting so anything they touch becomes a curiosity as well. A few notable meteorite “things” caught my attention and here’s the short list. The first thing is that the top hits on Google for “meteorite” no longer begin with science but rather marketed products.

The famous and well respected Ursula B. Marvin penned an opinion tome in the September 1995 issue of Meteoritics suggesting that the Siena meteorite fall of 1794 is “History’s Most Consequential Meteorite Fall.” No matter how you slice it, it’s a tall order for a meteorite to be the Most Consequential. The abstract of Marvin’s article is as follows: In

Back in 2004 I wrote a column for The Meteorite Times about my journey with Saturn and Cassini. By the time you read this the Cassini spacecraft will have said goodbye to us on earth and plunged into Saturn’s icy atmosphere, all 22 feet and 12,500 pounds of her (well, actually only 4,685 pounds since she lost some weight during

  Seventy years ago the largest witnessed fall of an iron meteorite crashed through the air above the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in southeastern Russia. February 12. 1947 was a year and half after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan so there is little doubt that such an explosion in the sky from a hundred thousand kilograms of iron from

Last month, I had the very great pleasure of spending time with a couple of reporters from our local newspaper. We first crossed paths back in March at a fossil and mineral show in town, and mentioned that meteorites were my game. Several months later, I got an email out of the blue that the reporters were interested putting together a

The Supuhee, India Chondrite fell to earth in the form of six individual stones back in 1865. Several of those stones landed on an indigo factory but unlike post-industrial revolution factory to follow, the indigo factory was where dyes were made and fabric was dyed.   Indigo dye begins with the leaves of the indigo plant. The leaves are steeped

Its hard to believe that the Peekskill Meteorite is already a quarter-century old. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Peekskill Meteorites, I am sharing some pictures of my slice along with a few words about the features that makes Peekskill such a wonderful specimen beyond the rather impressive artifacts of its fall.     Notice the

Back a number of years, I spent more than a few hours at the Tucson Show with Jim Tobin digging through boxes of unidentified NWA stones. There were pallets of rocks with most of the potential meteorites rolling around cardboard board boxes. It was clear that they had already been high-graded by the dealer with the most promising specimens already

Sometime late last century I purchased a chunk of Gibeon iron from Blaine Reed. It was a very well formed complete individual that contained many of the features I needed. Yes, needed. For this particular iron was going to earn its keep as a tool for teaching about the solar system. Since that time, literally thousands of students young and

The irons and iron fragments from Canyon Diablo or Meteorite Crater, or Meteor Crater, or Barringer Crater, or Coon Mountain or any of several other names is a staple in every collection. From huge display pieces to micro mounts, Canyon Diablo, or CDs, are important representative of meteorite history, meteorite science, and meteorite collecting. So as a meteorite collector, I

Jerome was first found in 1954. A single 6.8kg stone was recovered from a plowed field in Jerome county, Idaho. While interesting in that it’s a meteorite, Jerome lacked even the most basic dignity of a complete classification. But for now, we’ll just have to settle for Jerome, L chondrite. When I lived in Idaho, I visited Jerome often. Just

About two months before the end of last century, an hunter scouting a heard of elk literally crawled up on a meteorite. How did he know it was a meteorite and not one of the other billions of rocks lying around? Well, he just did. He believed it was from space even though the finder had never seen a meteorite

I’ve heard that the state of Idaho, if flattened, would be one of the largest continental states in the US. But of course it’s not. Instead Idaho is the left over after the surrounding states grabbed their territory. Essentially it’s an east-west state filled with north-south mountain ranges. Often it is easer to travel through a bordering state on your