Pena Blanca Springs Meteorite

Pena Blanca Springs Meteorite

On a hot August Saturday some sixty years ago at the Gage Ranch, a few miles southeast of Marathon, Texas, ranch hands and children shook themselves off as they splashed out of the swimming hole brimming from the waters of the Pena Blanca Spring. The cook at the nearby Forker House sat in a chair on the porch. Sweat trickled down her forehead. She peeled potatoes. A cabrito smoked in a pit and in the distance an old Ford truck with cowboys dusted up a caliche road.

A boom in the sky interrupted the otherwise clear day. A herd of horses nearby snorted and hooved in the dirt, followed by a noise that sounded like a car running on a flat tire. The old Ford had already parked at the tank and the cowboys were looking up. A second later they were dripping wet.

“It looked,” the cook said. “like a black bag falling out of the sky, with white dust coming out of it.”

Marathon resident Mattie V. Stuessy, sixteen at the time, was inside her family's home at the old railroad town of Haymond, a few miles from the watering hole. Her father Pless Chambers worked for the railroad. “I heard the sound.” Stuessy said. “But I thought it was daddy unloading ties.”

When asked about the incident four days later by student and meteorite collector O.E. Monnig of Ft. Worth, Mrs. Catto, whose home laid 75 yards from the tank, slammed her fist against her palm to illustrate the impact sound of the meteorite hitting the water. “I feel mighty lucky,” she said.

Meteorites fall everyday onto the earth, but few are found, fewer seen in descent and only a handful have ever been heard. But these are the characteristics of meteorites. They flash in the sky as they enter and burn in the earth’s atmosphere and are termed meteorites when they make it to the earth’s surface, most landing in the oceans. Meteors, however, vaporize in the atmosphere and never land. The cosmic velocity of a 1000 pound meteorite can reach 24 miles a second in space but once in our atmosphere, gravity can slow it down to as little as 250 miles per hour. The sound the swimmers heard was a sonic boom and the flat tire effect came from the scalloped profile of the rock sizzling through the air.

The Pena Blanca Springs Meteorite was dated at 4.5 billion years old or about the same age as the earth, coinciding with the formative epoch of our solar system. Ninety-nine per cent of meteorites are in this age category. Meteorites generally consist of fragments from asteroids that hover mostly in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter though sometimes meteorites contain parts of other planets or moons. Imprisoned by the gravity of our solar system, these rocks wander in space, some as far out as the Kuiper Belt until they collide with planetary atmospheres such as ours.

The Murchison Meteorite fell on Australia in 1969 and was dated to be about 30 million years older than the formation of our solar system. The rare particles found in it suggest that its origination may have been part of a super nova explosion that many scientists believe was the causal effect of our solar system.

The estimated weight of the Pena Blanca Springs Meteorite was about 200 lbs before it shattered against a bed of novaculite rock running under the tank. The meteorite is considered “stoney” meaning, the metal content was minimal, although there was a trace of iron and nickel. Because they are easier to spot and identify due to their weight and dark color, most “found” meteorites are almost pure iron and nickel, however iron/nickel meteorites represent only 6 per cent of fallen meteorites.

The Pena Blanca Springs meteorite contained organic compounds including carbon, oxygen and hydrogen and gave off a slight sulphur dioxide odor. It is classified by scientists as an aubrite, carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. It also contained amino acids, the proteins necessary for constructing life. The “Allende” meteorite that landed in Chihuahua in 1969, and the Murchison Meteorite, contained many types of amino acids, including some that don’t exist on earth. The leading suggestion that life started in some primordial ooze on earth might be upstaged by what’s happening outside of our planet.

The chances of being hit by a meteorite are rare. Some scientists calculate that if you lived on 400 acres of land, you’d have to wait a hundred thousand years to chance see a meteorite hit your domain. That’s the odds. And the formation of life, proteins compounding to kick start life out of stardust are astronomically improbably – but still possible.

Life is precious. Those swimmers who splashed in the waters of the Pena Blanca Spring back on August 2, 1946 experienced a close call. They may not have known that meteorites contain the building blocks that can give life but they surely knew that a big rock falling out of the sky can take it away.