A Mammoth Headache

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but nothing weirder than what befell a gaggle of woolly mammoths lumbering across the Siberian tundra some 30,000 years ago-- the sky lit up with a bang as they were struck by a hail of micrometeorites  the size of shotgun pellets.

How many were struck dead  by larger fragments, or blind  by lesser ones is problematic, but nickel iron pellets have been found, only on the skyward side , of seven Yakutian  fossil mammoth tusks and a horned  bison skull found in Alaska according to a paper researchers Allen West and Richard Firestone  presented on 11 December at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"We think that the micrometeorites came from an air-burst of a meteor 30,000 to 34,000 years ago,"  Firestone, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  told Nature "We think a wave of meteoric material sprayed the region."

Some of the tusks are peppered with hundreds of the  2 to 5 millmeter nickel-iron  fragments, which  burned  grooves into the bone. Strangely, the  damage to the tusk was first noted  not by the fearless mammoth hunters of Yakutia,  but an observant  rockhound at a fossil sale in a motel in Arizona.

According to Nature :

Allen West,[ who lives in Arizona]  was looking for evidence of a meteorite that he and his colleagues hypothesize  caused the megafaunal extinction and decline of  the Clovis people in North America some 13,000 years ago. Recalling previous visits to the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, West says, "A bulb went on in my head; I remembered seeing a room full of mammoth tusks there."  So he went to a motel that shows the fossils, and sifted through the tusks.

"I spent two or three hours looking at dirty old tusks, when suddenly there was a burnt hole," he says. He tested it with a small magnet, as he knew many meteorites were mostly iron. "Bang; it stuck right to the hole," he says.

West bought the 60-centimetre tusk for about US$200, and later headed to the warehouse of the company that he bought it from: Canada Fossils.

After three days of searching through the company's collection of some 15,000 tusks, West started to find more evidence of micrometeorites in a batch from the Yukutia Peninsula in eastern Siberia. His magnet again repeatedly hit the mark on tell-tale burn holes.

West bought these tusks too and took them to Firestone and his colleagues for geochemical analysis and radiocarbon dating

Comments

[Ron Schwarz]

Somewhat tangential (well, maybe more than "somewhat" :) -- when the Chicago Fire happened, there were similar fires throughout the Great Lakes region, including my part of Western Michigan and Wisconsin. Massive fires all over the place.

Either a grand series of coincident events, or, a meteor did its thing.

Even more tangential, about 15 years ago, back when I was living in Central Michigan, I heard a LOUD explosion --

[Ron Schwarz]

Hi, Russell. Could you please delete the remains of my post above? Now that my point has been edited out, well, it's kinda pointless :)

Thanks!

(I'd do it myself, but I can't seem to find a delete button.)

--Ron

[Russell]

Eliminating pointlessness is the whole point editing.

Feel free to start over on the point that hot , dry, windy conditions in a region are conducive to a high incidence of fires.

[William Sidmore]

Well, While in the high Arctic one does come across a diagnostic fossil from time to time and I just want to say to the scientific community just how common mammoth tusks are and something informative from the pathology study can be rewarding. People are scared now from the abuse of the threats of land use and increased restrictions that the scientific community got what they wanted...the low common folk just stay home and watch National Geographic and realize their position as citizen...

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