Meteors are falling on your head all the time, or so it is said. I’ve heard that you can collect meteorites by sifting through the stuff that accumulates in your gutters with a magnet. The magnet ignores the silica rock and tarry stuff that your roof is made of, but picks up the iron bits which tend to be meteoric dust. I’m not sure if I believe that, but this is what is said.
One of the best places to get meteorites is in Antarctica, because they land on ice instead of land, and are thus not mixed up with non meteoric rocky stuff, they stand out on the background, and there are certain glacial forces that concentrate them (and bring them to the surface) so they can be easily found.
Why do I even mention this? Well, for reasons that are NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS (yet) I’ve been reading about meteors on the Antarctic ice, and I came across this web site:
Ansmet The Antarctic Search for Meteorites
and thought you might like to see it.
I should mention that I discovered this site via Bad Astronomy, so Hat Tip to Phil.
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One can, indeed, pick up micrometeorites by sifting with a magnet. It was an activity I did several times with students when I taught at a science center in California.
Going on a new field trip eh Greg 🙂
We must stop those meteorites from falling on Antarctica!! If the Nazi Yeti get hold of them, who knows what chaos they might wreak?!!?!
Yah, so, why have you been reading about meteors in the Antarctic ice? Hey man, you started writing this blog and so you OWE it to your blog readers who want to know the minutiae of you daily life, damn you!
Aw, come on, Strider. He said, “yet.” Surely you can wait until the end of the week or so.
Not that the end of the week is anything other than an arbitrarily chosen time. Nope, nope. Of course not.
It would be easy to be fooled by magnetite anywhere in the Midwest. I would want to check the gutters on a very tall building. Are the micrometeorites spherical?
Blind: I was thinking the same thing … not just magnetite, but anything ferric because you are using a magnet to search. One would think a tall building would make a difference. You need to get above the Yeck Zone which, with snow and wind, is probably fifteen feet at least.
I would imagine that the micrometeorites would look like tiny burned up spheroidal thingies. Maybe I’ll look for them this year, finally. I’ve always wanted to do that.
I think you might have won the intertubes award for the most obscure scientific term of the day. I can’t find it in a cursory Google search. I assume it refers to the erosion zone seen on rocks in the dessert. Did R. D. Yeck coin it? Anyhow, it doesn’t seem like an absolute limit when one considers sand storms or wind devils, thankfully rare in MN.
Oh, for the love of the FSM. I am referring to the term Yeck zone in Greg’s reply to my first post and I am aware of the subtle difference between desert and dessert.