METEORITE MYSTERY

Hokitika Guardian, 29 October 1931, Page 3

METEORITE MYSTERY

■SECRET OF 130-TON “BLUE MOON.” DEVASTATED FOREST. A dark-blue moon was moving across (the northern sky. A*trail of b.ne light behind it grew dimmer and faded away in the June sunrise over the distant hiils. A reindeer herder witnessed this strange phenomenon. A moment latei he was thrown from his feet by a violent explosion that shook the forest about him. Later that same day an observer in the United States Weather Bureau in Washington bent curiously over a microharograph record. This i nst.ru men,t- records disturbances in die alums phcrc, somewhat as a seismograph records disturbances in the earth.

‘‘Something funny,” said the observer. The lines traced on the record showed a minute disturbance for which lie could not account. It had come from Itlie direction of the North Pole. Fie made a mental iffito and laid the record aside. For 23 years it lay undisturbed in the flies of the Weather Bureau. A few weeks ago it was resurrected, carefully photographed, and laid away -with great care.

The observer had under hits eye one of ,the greatest “news scoops" of ad time, if he had known how to interpret those minute variations, amounting to about one thirty-second of an inch, in the barograph line. The planet had just received its greatest -shock from outer space during historic times. It was between 5 and 6 a.m., June 30, 1908. RECORDED ON CHARTS. 'Fhe reindeer herder,- his brother recounted afterward, was so upset that he never entirely recovered from th shock. The earth had just been struck by an enormous meteor. The impac" was in the depths of. a northern Siberian forest, so far away from civilisation that no real .explanation' of what had happened was forthcoming for more than 12 years. The discovery of the barograph record in Washington constitutes one of the final chapters in this strange story.

The shock wa-s so great that- the waves tt- set up in the atmosphere came as far as Washington directly over the l North Role, a distance o'f approximately 5.6C0 miles, and still retained sufficient magnitude' to affect an instrument there. Recently a barograph record of the event was identified in England. This recalled to Dr William J. Humphreys, of the Weather Bureau, the curious marks he had noted years before. He went to .the -files and found that the date corresponded to the meteor collision. SCIENTISTS INDIFFERENT.

At the time, .the primitive folk of it he'Siberian wilderness and Russian settlers knew that something out of the ordinary had happened. An earth shock was felt in -the city of Irkutsk. Strange stories slowly tneklod-iout-'O-fccithe wilderness of that weird blue moon -speeding athwart the June morning. But the scene was so remote .that scientists paid no attention to the tales. When they were beginning to get interested the world war came along and they had something else to do. Tt was not until 1927 t-hnii the Soviet

Government finally sent an expedition to find out "hat had happened. The scientists found an area of dosoh-Cpn aboir 60 kilometres square. Trees were blowr down, stripped of their bark and branches, as it by a curious freak cyclone. Here and there tiny patches of forest had been left untouched. The whole area was a crater-like valley. There were depressions, covered over in the years which had elapsed, which indicate that heavy bodies had penetrated the earth. The -Russians found a few witnesses still Fving. Remains of the meteorite itsedf were buried beyond hope of recovery. WHAT MIGHT HAVE RE EX.

They were able to reconstruct partially what had happened. The blue moon had fallen from the sky, preceded by an incandescent gas cloud driven with such force that i.t had displaced ■the atmosphere close to the earth through which it fell, setting up on all subs the great wind which hid stripped the forests. Somewhere in the course of its fall the meteor itself had -split into several fragments, each ol which had penetrated the earth like a buiSet, enuring the earth vibrations which were, recorded on seismographs, • but which were dismissed as .those,, of a slight earth tremor.

The Russian geologists estimated that the total weight of the meteorite had been about 130 tons. They could obtain no information as to its constitution. It was by Tar the heaviest celestial visitor within recent times. The impact might well have been one of the major disasters of history. Had its path been a little different it might have fallen in the heart of the modern city of Irkutsk, instead of the thinly-populated northern wilderness.

The recent announcement of an English meteonogist that he had found the disturbance recorded on barograph records in England, started the search in America, with the result that the ■time and direction of the hitherto rtn-' explained disaster were found to cheelj almost exactly with what might have been calculated mathematically from the actual event.