polished and etched.… The weight of the specimen is now 181.1 grams. In sending this fragment of the Willamette Meteorite I do not want the University of Oregon to feel any definite obligation. I felt that your University should have a piece of the largest meteorite ever found in the United States since it came from your state.”
Professor Pruett, in an attempt to assuage the feelings of scientifically-minded Oregonians, displayed the etched meteorite slice from the American Museum of Natural History alongside one of the rough fragments that had been hammered off on the Harold Johnson property. For good measure, Pruett commissioned a life-sized plaster model of the WillametteMeteorite that for years stood on the porch of the university’s chemistry building.
The receipt of this fragment also apparently spurred Pruett to send a photographer and journalism student to West Linn to look up Ellis Hughes. After the final state supreme court decision, he had returned to farming, but he had to admit that he remained bitter about his “inglorious and unjust defeat” three decades earlier.
The Guardian
The saga of the Willamette meteorite continued to evolve in the face of new scientific techniques and old-fashioned detective work. Sleuths who visited the stone’s original depression near West Linn found that the pit was lined with a shard of oxidized iron crust, heavy with nickel; chemists determined that when the meteorite originally landed, it probably weighed over twenty tons. Modern laboratories also confirmed Henry Ward’s notion that the stone’s kettle holes had resulted from terrestrial weathering—when western Oregon’s heavy annual rainfall and acidic forest environment met the meteorite’s troilite mineral in what began as shallow depressions, the result was dilute, aerated sulfuric acid. Further activated by pulses of precipitation, over a long period of time these acidic puddles ate their way into the body of the stone.
The molecular structure of the Willamette Meteorite told a more complex story. This study required carefully polishing and etching small samples of the rock with acid, but luckily, there seemed to be plenty of those available. Today, the locations of museums around the world that claim a shard of the Willamette Meteorite range from Budapest to the Vatican, with many more fragments believed to be in private hands. Spectrographs andphotochronographs of thin sections cut from miscellaneous shards reveal recrystallized kamacite and distorted, shock-melted troilite. Sensitive chemical analysis betrays varying percentages of nitrogen and phosphorous. Gas detectors sniff traces of helium, argon, and neon.
Although scientists would like to make a more comprehensive study of the original meteorite, Mrs. Dodge’s stipulation that it remain intact, as a museum display, precludes any invasive sampling. Even so, geochemists and structural geologists have assembleda rough biography of the Willamette Meteorite that winds through at least five distinct stages. It is a story that continues to be modified as new evidence and new lab techniques appear.
The first chapter of the celestial stone’s existence was set in outer space, and consisted of a primary slow-cooling period. This would correspond to clouds of matter cooling into the original planets of our solar system, in a time frame often estimated as four billion years ago.
At some point while still embedded in deep time, the meteorite’s crystalline structure recorded a terrific shock and subsequent reheating. After that episode, it cooled again into a very different form. Other meteorites that have been analyzed show a similar pattern, and some scientists interpret this as an event similar to the catastrophic collision that created the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Stage three was marked by a second, lesser shock—perhaps a glancing blow from another space object that flung the Willamette fragment out of a stable orbit into a more
Professor Pruett, in an attempt to assuage the feelings of scientifically-minded Oregonians, displayed the etched meteorite slice from the American Museum of Natural History alongside one of the rough fragments that had been hammered off on the Harold Johnson property. For good measure, Pruett commissioned a life-sized plaster model of the WillametteMeteorite that for years stood on the porch of the university’s chemistry building.
The receipt of this fragment also apparently spurred Pruett to send a photographer and journalism student to West Linn to look up Ellis Hughes. After the final state supreme court decision, he had returned to farming, but he had to admit that he remained bitter about his “inglorious and unjust defeat” three decades earlier.
The Guardian
The saga of the Willamette meteorite continued to evolve in the face of new scientific techniques and old-fashioned detective work. Sleuths who visited the stone’s original depression near West Linn found that the pit was lined with a shard of oxidized iron crust, heavy with nickel; chemists determined that when the meteorite originally landed, it probably weighed over twenty tons. Modern laboratories also confirmed Henry Ward’s notion that the stone’s kettle holes had resulted from terrestrial weathering—when western Oregon’s heavy annual rainfall and acidic forest environment met the meteorite’s troilite mineral in what began as shallow depressions, the result was dilute, aerated sulfuric acid. Further activated by pulses of precipitation, over a long period of time these acidic puddles ate their way into the body of the stone.
The molecular structure of the Willamette Meteorite told a more complex story. This study required carefully polishing and etching small samples of the rock with acid, but luckily, there seemed to be plenty of those available. Today, the locations of museums around the world that claim a shard of the Willamette Meteorite range from Budapest to the Vatican, with many more fragments believed to be in private hands. Spectrographs andphotochronographs of thin sections cut from miscellaneous shards reveal recrystallized kamacite and distorted, shock-melted troilite. Sensitive chemical analysis betrays varying percentages of nitrogen and phosphorous. Gas detectors sniff traces of helium, argon, and neon.
Although scientists would like to make a more comprehensive study of the original meteorite, Mrs. Dodge’s stipulation that it remain intact, as a museum display, precludes any invasive sampling. Even so, geochemists and structural geologists have assembleda rough biography of the Willamette Meteorite that winds through at least five distinct stages. It is a story that continues to be modified as new evidence and new lab techniques appear.
The first chapter of the celestial stone’s existence was set in outer space, and consisted of a primary slow-cooling period. This would correspond to clouds of matter cooling into the original planets of our solar system, in a time frame often estimated as four billion years ago.
At some point while still embedded in deep time, the meteorite’s crystalline structure recorded a terrific shock and subsequent reheating. After that episode, it cooled again into a very different form. Other meteorites that have been analyzed show a similar pattern, and some scientists interpret this as an event similar to the catastrophic collision that created the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Stage three was marked by a second, lesser shock—perhaps a glancing blow from another space object that flung the Willamette fragment out of a stable orbit into a more
Similar Books
