In this installation, I wanted to focus on meteorites whose arrival made waves, first physically and then literally based on their splashdowns. I am very guilty of collecting meteorites that have shared eccentric backstories. Given the Earth is covered by ~71 percent water, statistically speaking, most meteorites make a splashdown vs a terra firma touchdown. That said, the ones that touchdown are the ones recovered, and the ones that splashdown, well, those typically stay in situ in the unfathomable depths of Davy Jones’ Locker. There are, however, a few meteorites with an aquatic pedigree that with cosmic luck, end up in fathomable waters, be it in the littorals, lakes or rivers, and now you can add swimming pools to that list!
There is a good chance this article is not all-encompassing, as it’s still an active subject I am researching, and there certainly isn’t consolidated literature out there on the topic.
Like my rabbit meteorite foray under the “odd backstory” category of the collection, this one had its beginning in the much more commonly pursued goal of collecting type-fall meteorites. In my quest to do that, I finally found myself at Angra Dos Reis, and that’s where things went on a tangent and a new subset of my collection was born.
Angra Dos Reis is the namesake of the Angrites; it is the only observed fall in the metbul of the 62 listed angrites. It has a fall date listed as 20 January 1869, at which point it arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The National Museum of Brazil’s website provides a detailed account surrounding the meteorite’s fall and subsequent recovery: It fell in January 1869, in front of the Bonfim Church in Praia Grande, Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro, and was witnessed by Joaquim Carlos Travassos and two of his slaves. The latter recovered two fragments from a depth of about 2 meters, one of which was donated to the National Museum. This story got me to like Angra Dos Reis more for its splashdown than for its rarity in availability or its scientific significance, and its story certainly doesn’t stop at its unusual wet landing location. The second piece, which was supposed to eventually make it to the museum, was lost, and the remarkably small amount of material from the first stone survived both a theft attempt in 1997 and then a devastating fire in 2018. Talk about a stone that has seen a lot of things.
It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever make it into space, but I have had the pleasure of floating neutrally buoyant 200+ feet below the surface of the ocean at night on a rebreather dive. It’s cold, and if you turn your lights off, it’s pitch black and completely silent. The technology keeping you breathing is the same technology used in the Portable (or Primary) Life Support System used by astronauts. I would say it is about as close as a proxy experience to being out in space without leaving the planet as the average person can have. It’s a feeling I like to reminisce about often while handling meteorites, thinking about what it was like for those stones as they were floating weightless through the black, cold, silent void of space for all that time before their final chance encounter with Earth. On the flip side, it also fascinates me to think that the meteorites in this particular article experienced so much liquid water when their journey finally ended. Water is the facet of Earth that sets it apart as such an odd body in our solar system. You can run into a hard rocky body anywhere out there; Earth is the rare place you can splash down on. It’s not hard to let your imagination wander from there. Think about being on the surface of an ancient Mars, in its wetter heyday, when the skies were blue like Earth’s. Imagine witnessing a meteor streaking through the thicker atmosphere to collide with a Martian lake or ocean.
But enough daydreaming, on to the other meteorites with aquatic pedigrees.
Djati-Pengilon is another wet denizen. This H6 meteorite fell on March 19th, 1884, in Indonesia. A single stone was hauled out of the Aloesta river shortly after the fall, and at 365 lbs, it is no lightweight. Djati-Pengilon, is in fact, the heftiest of the 99 H6 falls. With a decent total known weight, it’s a remarkably obscure meteorite to come across in collections. Its rarity is for good reason; the main mass, relatively intact, is right where it belongs as the main attraction of the Indonesian National Geological Museum.
Bjurbole is another meteorite that made a wet but mostly splashless entry, considering it had to make it through a substantially thick layer of sea ice. An account of the physical state of the impact site from the 12 March 1899 Fall in Finland includes that the hole in ~1-meter-thick ice was around four meters in width. Surrounding this hole was a region of broken ice 10 meters in diameter, and that water, sediment and ice chunks had been thrown up to 20 meters away. Apparently, the 1800s was a good time for aquatically recovered meteorites. Bjurbole presented a unique recovery issue, as the far-flung sediments indicate, it managed to not just punch through a substantial ice layer, and a meter of unfrozen water but additionally 8 meters of mud and clay. This is a feat anyone who has handled Bjurbole should find extremely impressive, considering how incredibly friable a meteorite it is. The first fragments were recovered at around the one-month mark after finding the hole in the ice. The recovery process involved making a wood caisson around the location to allow for a partial removal of the water at the site and to stabilize the loose sediment of the seabed. After two months of recovery work, a total of 330 kilograms of fragments were recovered. Stack such a cool story, on top of Bjurbole being a rare transitional classification (1:22 L/LL4 meteorites), and its age gives this meteorite plenty of reasons to add it to a collection.
Fast forward nearly 50 years to the 2nd of August 1946, and Pena Blanca Springs is added to the splashdown list. 24 individuals in the immediate vicinity witnessed 70 Kilograms of Aubrite plunge into the swimming hole on the A.S. Gage Ranch in Brewster County, Texas. Oscar E. Monnig wrote about the preliminary details of the fall in the December issue of Popular Astronomy Vol 54, stating, “The remarkable circumstances of the fall and the recovery are related, including the splashing of water onto the truck of two passers-by”. Monnig, along with another gentleman from Fort Worth, Mr. Harrison Morse, conducted most of the recovery of pieces of the meteorite from the swimming hole after the water level was dropped on the 6th of August. John Lonsdale provided more in-depth details as to the circumstances of the finding in American Mineralogist Volume 32 of 1947, a good read with many descriptive accounts from the witnesses. If you get a chance and want to check it out, it’s a worthy read here. For those who want just the watery landing Cliff Notes, John wrote:
“Subsequent examination showed that water had been driven 100 feet from the edge of the pool. Wisps of moss from the pool were found on rocks and bushes at the edge of the pool and on the road. The water of the pool was not muddy but seemed to be darker than usual.
The meteorite fell about 2 ½ Feet from the bank of the pool in about 2 feet of water. After the pool was drained about 4 feet below normal level, it was seen that a hole about 2 feet in diameter and 1.5 feet deep had been driven into the silt and earth forming the shelving bank. Novaculite and chert rocks are present beneath the silt and earth and limited the penetration of the meteoritic material. One fragment of 13kg was recovered about 1 foot from alongside the hole. Another of 47 kg was recovered from deeper water about 8 feet from the hole.”
By far the most well-known of the splashdown meteorites has to be Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk fell on 15 February 2013. The initial write-up from Metbul 102 states, an eight-meter hole was observed in the ice-covered Chebarkul Lake, which may have been caused by a meteorite. Small fragments of meteorite were recovered from around the hole, but divers did not find any stones at the bottom of the lake. Fast-forward to Metbul 103 entitled Chelyabinsk, recovery of additional masses the update yields that in the month following the bolide, 5 kg of well-documented fragments were recovered from the lakebed using magnets, along with around 10 kg of additionally recovered fragments by local divers using similar tactics. The update gets to the really good details explaining that additional diving operations conducted between the 5th of September and the 16th of October resulted in the recovery of 8 additional fragments. The operation terminated on the 16th with the recovery of a 540 Kilogram piece, the main mass, which spent 8 months on the bottom of the lake. A comparison of the photos of the hole in the ice made by Bjurbole and Chelybinsk shows the stark contrast in how far photography has come over the 114 years between the two falls in how we can document strewnfield conditions. Watching the color video footage of the Chelyabinsk main mass being hauled onto shore is even more impressive when being able to reach back in time and re-experience meteorite recoveries.
The final meteorite to round out the splashdown list is McDonough, Georgia. If Nitro Cellulose-based still-photography at Bjurbole to digital-video capture at Chelyabinsk was a jump highlighting the evolution of recording technology from the 19th to 20th century. The ability to be “virtually there” via real-time social media livestream is the new big breakthrough of the 21st century. Nowadays we are spoiled in the meteorite community, to be virtually present as finds are happening even when we can’t make it out to hunt a fresh fall. That is exactly what happened with this last and most recent splashdown stone. On July 4th Steve Arnold shared a live stream from the McDonough strewnfield. McDonough had been a highly productive bolide with its fair share of hammer stones. While searching a suburban backyard with Dave Kenny, they happened to eyeball what might be a small meteorite in the bottom of a pool. It was intriguing enough to warrant getting wet to investigate so fully clothed, in went Steve on Facebook livestream where those lucky enough to be watching, got to witness the recovery of a 16.8 gram stone that had spent a week at the bottom of a swimming pool.
As meteorite hunters, we are striving to find meteorites as quickly as possible, and with as little exposure to moisture as possible. Collectors place a premium on “prerain” pieces and pieces collected early on with lower visible weathering. Likewise, from a scientific perspective, the less terrestrial altered a piece is, the more valuable it is from a research perspective. Meteorite exposure to water typically gets a bad rap, but when it adds to a piece’s story, it just might end up being the defining characteristic that sets a meteorite apart from the droves of others of the same type.
