the explorers journal - The Explorers Club

a date with the
meteorite men
Sometimes all the high-tech stuff in the world is no
match for experience, luck, and a sharp eye.
I’m standing where blue sky meets the yellow
sand of a west Texas oil desert and where
a chance encounter with the extraterrestrial
changed forever the shape and texture of this
landscape.
Some 63,000 years ago, a school bus-sized
mass of molten iron and nickel from the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter plunged to
Earth here, leaving a hole 30 meters deep and
170 meters across. The explosion, equivalent to
three times that of the atom bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, spewed shrapnel over a 2.5-kilometer
by Jim Clash
radius, scouring four more smaller craters nearby.
I had never heard of Odessa until recently.
Flipping through cable channels one night, I
came across a Discovery Science show called
Meteorite Men. Geoffrey Notkin and Steve
Arnold, the stars, stood in a barren Kansas
cornfield while a Hydratrek tractor pulled an
odd-looking, Rube-Goldberg assortment of
wires and pipes behind it. The giant metal detector
made alternating high- and low-pitched alien
sounds as it bumped along.
As with most shows like this (MonsterQuest,
Ghost Lab, UFO Hunters), I expected an
entertaining buildup but was pretty sure that
nothing would be found. I was wrong. Two giant
extraterrestrial gold is found in the oddest places. Photo by Suzanne Morrison ©aerolite meteorites. Facing page, the tell-tale reddish-black patina is a good sign that this is a meteorite. Photo by Jim Clash.
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