return to tektites

[kahaokamoku]

Okay, I got me a piece of Moldavite. I was in Nordlingen which is locate in the Ries impact Crater. I went to the Ries Crater museum. I also found out that nordlingen is pretty intact going back to the middle ages. The wall is still standing tall completely around the city. Cool City and free parking outside the city.

I learned a lot . . . . like . . . Moldavite is not located there. It is located by the river Molda . . . in Czechoslovia. Dummy me.

I got more ideas as well. Learned a lot of stuff, but forgot to ask some dummy questions.

Before the questions, I have seen tidal waves from meteorites in film, but the landscape around ries crater, you can see that something blew this area apart. I think the dead zone was 100 Kilometers. 2000 hiroshimas. a kilometer in diameter meteorite.

Anyways here is my dummy question.

What are the odds that some of this stuff is shot in the direction of the black forest like moldavite?

Second, How hard is the iron in these meteorites? could I sell a sword in the stone time steel of sorts. The temperatures are so high . . . it must melt something worth something.

Third, Are all meteorites one or the other, iron or rock or are there mixtures of rock and iron?

. . . I have my moldavite stone around my neck. Ready for transformation.

[Fortean]

1. Odds are unlikely. Tektites are believed to be debris re-entering the atmosphere after a major meteoric impact. Of course, there's always the chance of a tektite straying away from the debris field, carried by a curiosity seeker or transported by a whirlwind; but, an object broken off of the main body that produced the Ries crater could have fallen in the Black Forest.

2. Some meteorites have been compared to steel. See: Berwerth, Frederick, "Steel and meteoric iron," Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute, 75 (1907): 37-51; or: "A tempered steel meteorite," Nature, 49 (February 15, 1894): 372.

3. Scientists took a long time to accept the existence of stones that fell from the sky, and they remain reluctant to accept any irregular objects beyond stony, iron, or carbonaceous objects, as meteorites. I'm not aware of any mixture of iron and stone within a single meteorite, (and, no sword-in-the-stone type). A few small pieces of iron have been found inside coal and have been thought to be ancient meteorites; but, modern scientists have managed to ignore these "fossil meteorites."

[Architeuthis Dux]

Actually, some iron meteorites do have chunks of rock in them. I've seen them, sliced in half, at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Also, rocky meteors are far likelier to disintegrate before they hit the earth. The cold meteor, screaming in from space, shatters when it hits the atmosphere from a combination of the outside rapidly becoming white hot and the impact of hitting the atmosphere.

The truth is that we don't know that much about meteors. Every time one of them suitable for study gets close enough, we send up a crew of oil field workers to blow it apart with an A-bomb so it won't wipe out life on earth.

[kahaokamoku]

That's what I thought too. Damn oil field workers.

I am trying to get an handle on tektites. I understand the material that's lifted and drops.

I understand that Moldavite was shot out between the meteorite and the earth's surface upon impact. It was like squeezed out. That is what I understand.

I just don't understand why it only shot in that direction and why that mixture. Wouldn't it have been shot in more directions or maybe it hasn't been discovered in other areas????

Most likely no one knows why.

Someone want to take a shot at it. Fortean???

[Fortean]

I doubt that tektites were ejected from the Ries crater in one direction and only rained down in the Czech Republic. Strewn fields cover large areas. The Australasian tektites are found over an area of about 20 million square miles. Offhand, I'd think that, after the impact at the Ries crater, (about 15 million years ago), the glaciers of the Ice Ages probably destroyed most of these glassy objects in the rest of Europe but missed those buried in the Czechoslovakian strewn field.

[Augie Kestrel]

If I understand what I've just read, the Ries meteor impacted the Earth at a steep angle; it didn't hit the Earth "head-on" (and if you think about it, very few meteors do, I guess). I think that's the reason why the "splash pattern" heads off in primarily one direction (to the SSE, I think).

I'm not sure I understood the "sword-in-the-stone" question. Are you asking if we think there may be some value in obtaining and marketing products manufactured from iron originating from meteoric impact? I'm not sure there is a market for this sort of thing, beyond the moldavite you're already familiar with. I keep thinking that everything "iron" that I own was made from stuff billions of years old, anyway. I don't think there would be significant cachet in knowing that your "meteoric" iron may be a couple of billion years older than the iron most people already have.

[kahaokamoku]

A good reason.

funny though the presentation and the book that I bought did not mention that.

A good reason.

The presentation was more like a right angle to the earth.

[Augie Kestrel]

It looks like opinions are all over the map:

""The known moldavite strewn field extends from about 200 to 450 km from the center of the Ries to the ENE forming a fan with an angle of about 57°. An oblique impact of a binary asteroid from a WSW direction appears to explain the locations of the craters and the formation and distribution of the moldavites."

From: 216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:3RLu922YsygJ:www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/largeimpacts2003/pdf/4050.pdf+Ries+crater+moldavite&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 (http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:3RLu922YsygJ:www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/largeimpacts2003/pdf/4050.pdf+Ries+crater+moldavite&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

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"The...discrepancies indicate that the rise of moldavites was different to classical impact theory, which in the case of the Ries crater cannot be fully accepted. In my opinion it is possible to explain the rise of moldavites during the impact in the Ries’ crater through the following: According to the positioning of the impact breccia it is clear that the body which caused the Ries’ crater came in at an oblique angle from a northerly to northwesterly direction."

From: mujweb.atlas.cz/www/lugh/uvod.htm (http://mujweb.atlas.cz/www/lugh/uvod.htm)

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So, if I read it right, it appears that the second opinion (the first one I stumbled upon) comes from a "rogue" geologist of
sorts. Both sources do appear to agree that the impact was not "head-on", each indicating a general direction other than "straight down".

I had no idea there was such juicy controversy in the worlds of geology/astronomy! :)

[Fortean]

Altho the "single meteoric impact" theory still predominates, if more than one meteor struck, one from the north or northwest, and another from the west-southwest, a conspiracy may be proven.

[pantalone]

<<<<Altho the "single meteoric impact" theory still predominates, if more than one meteor struck, one from the north or northwest, and another from the west-southwest, a conspiracy may be proven. >>>>

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the grassy meteor theory.

[kahaokamoku]

Well, thanks for the info. I put in a new processor, mother board and graphic card. Technician did . . . I lost everything on my C drive. . . .

I did not loose any of my writing, but I lost most of my research links and a lot of other information. My wife was upset because she lost all her photos. I told her to down load them on disc.

I will go through this material. Thanks.