Accretion Desk

The 2020 pandemic has made most of us consider our mortality, and sadly, many discovering it firsthand. As a young (or old) 57 years of walking this planet, I’ve had a partner in Karatu, a meteorite that fell in my birth year of 1963 on the opposite side of the world. Both Karatu and I were non-existent on earth the

A lone shooting star graced the evening sky of the Lone Star state back in 1909, one of only two witnessed meteorite falls that year. Normally the excitement of a fireball would make the news and keep the conversations animated at the local diner, but not this time. The simple reason for barely a mention in the local press was

In the previous issue of the Meteorite Times, I highlighted a famous Oklahoma meteorite fall named Lost City. While Lost City is arguably the most important and well known fall from the Sooner state, the first witnessed fall in the state actually occurred while Oklahoma was still a territory. The Blackwell meteorite fell in May of 1906, a full year

After 600 hours of work, the search for additional pieces of the Lost City meteorite was called off. Four fragments had been recovered with a total weight of 17 kg. And that’s where the story both ends and begins. In 1962, an array of 16 cameras of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Meteorite Photography and Recovery Project, also known as the

With cameras almost everywhere these days, capturing an event no matter how serendipitous, is almost expected. However, a meteorite whose fall is photographed is still a rare breed indeed. The list is a short one and all members on that list are desirable to collectors and scientists alike. Lost City is probably the most famous of the scientific image captures,

For this installment of the Accretion Desk, I have a link to a recent podcast where I discussed the meteorites of Idaho with the hosts of The Nature of Idaho podcast. As an avid collector of Idaho meteorites including Jerome and Wilder, as well as the concept that Yellowstone Park was initiated by a meteorite impact,     The podcast

Last April marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of the Bovedy meteorite, but with all the 50 year celebrations in 2019 including the first moon landing, its easy to understand how the Golden Anniversary of Bovedy could slip through the cracks. Fortunately, the BBC remembered Bovedy’s birthday, as they should: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-48023047 The arrival of Bovedy is filled with glorious

If a meteorite falls in the woods and nobody writes an account of its arrival, does it count as a witnessed fall? Or perhaps maybe this: it was a dark and smokey streak across the sky. Oh, and include a fiery explosion, a fierce whistling, and a cow knocked off its feet! Oh yeah, and that two women had to

On the 455th birthday of William Shakespeare’s birth, a CM2 stony meteorite crashed into Costa Rica, a country one-seventh the size of my Montana and one-third the population. What that means is that I can imagine what its like there in terms of population density and size, but with less snow, fewer grizzly bears, and no ponderosa pine trees. Murchison,

It was a good day for meteorites, but a bad one for a local resident of who’s funeral was in progress when the diogenite fell from the heavens. As if a loud disruption and falling rocks weren’t bad enough during the somber time, a 10kg chunk of achondritic asteroid mantle landed just a few paces from a chapel in a

Unlike other meteorite craters, the largest of famous Henbury iron meteorite craters formed when the giant lizard-woman named Mulumura dug down through the Australian soil throwing out iron fragments and lines of orange dirt in what would later be called ejecta forming the rays around the 180 meter-wide depression. Wisely, other Aboriginal people would not camp near the crater for

An hour after midnight half a century ago, one of the most important meteoritic events ever appeared in the southwestern sky above the Mexican state of Chihuahua. And by the next morning, a formally very rare class of meteorite was now not only abundant, but as fresh as they come and on it’s way to labs around the world. As

Yellowstone National Park is an amazing place. As far as national parks in America are concerned, I find Yellowstone to be more of an amusement park filled with bizarre and fascinating and scary geology rather than a scenic park like Glacier or Arches. And as a super volcano, Yellowstone Park is an anomaly that defies continental odds, and invites millions

Too many years ago to remember, I stumbled on some Allende individuals at the Tucson Show. Hardly a solid find given the quantity and distribution of Allende meteorite samples. In fact, I recall hesitating about purchasing the individuals, but my weakness for numbered specimens with matching cards carried me through. In the end I purchased two of the kits. Each

The Holbrook, Arizona fall of 1912 is a classic event in meteoritics both for its scale and its availability. Holbrook is a common fall in collections and complete individuals range from sub-gram six kilos, and from fresh-after-the-fall to found yesterday. The L6 chondrite fell not far from the famous Meteor Crater. About 60 miles by road in fact. And even