Beyond the academic hunters, any numbers of enterprising meteorite hounds were also out searching in northern Iowa for the rock. Even today, while the number of known meteorites collected on Earth is in the tens of thousands, the number of falls seen and subsequently collected by humans is a little over a thousand.Īll of which meant there was a great deal of value attached to the meteorite that fell that May afternoon. But despite the seeming frequency of falls in northern Iowa in the last quarter of the 1800s, in fact it is extremely rare to witness a meteor shower and then find the actual rocks that rained down from above. Meteorites have fallen from the heavens through all of recorded history. Sniffing for meteorites on behalf of the museum and his father, Horace headed south from Minneapolis, stopping first in Faribault to check out reports of sightings there before aiming toward Iowa, where already teams of scholars from the University of Iowa and Grinnell College were in the field. Winchell was himself an accomplished student of geology and had a long, influential career as a practicing geologist. There was hardly a rock in Minnesota that Newton hadn’t inspected. Aside from heading the University’s geology studies, Newton was also director of the state’s Geological and Natural History Survey, first director of the Minnesota Natural History Museum, and the state’s highest authority on its many natural resources. Winchell, the son of the esteemed chair of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geology, Newton H. That fact sent meteorite hunters from across the region out into the field in search of the stone. But aside from Hoagland and the handful he told, no one knew for a couple of days precisely where the big rock had landed. In papers throughout the state and up into Minnesota, news went out announcing the event. Word spread quickly across the Upper Midwest that another meteorite had flashed across the Iowa sky, just like the famed Estherville Aerolite of 1879. It buried itself three feet deep but was neither smoking nor hot to the touch when he found it, despite the fact it had just burned through the atmosphere on its way to Earth. Hundreds of small chunks of the meteorite (or aerolite, as they were known then) peppered the landscape for miles around, but one of the biggest rocks landed in prairie grass on the farm worked by Hoagland. It was just after 5 o’clock on May 2, 1890. What his mind’s eye envisioned, as he grabbed his spade and headed out toward the landing zone, were stacks of greenbacks, not armies of little green men. Which might explain why, when one of the biggest chunks of this aerolite settled on a farm near Forest City, about 15 miles south of the central Minnesota border, the tenant there, Peter Hoagland, had no qualms about racing toward the impact. Most knew what they were seeing before it hit the ground. Across more than a dozen counties in northern Iowa and a half-dozen more in Minnesota, witnesses stared at the phenomenon with a wonder tempered by the fact that the same sort of alien force had visited Iowa just 11 years earlier, in Estherville. It crackled like burning timber, according to accounts, leaving a smoking trail in the atmosphere and gaping mouths below. The thing mellowed to a burning light then arced west to east above the Iowa towns below, moving at the deliberate pace of a celestial freight train. Kudos to the U of M Alumni Association for this story.Ī yellow flash as big as the moon appeared in the late afternoon sky accompanied by an echoing boom. The following article was first published as “Romancing the Meteorite” in the University of Minnesota Alumni Magazine () by Tim Brady.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |