Imagine one morning you’re sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating breakfast—then you notice the most beautiful fireball in the sky soaring down to Earth, breaking apart at 5.6km altitude, and crashing into the middle of your street, shattering into thousands of pieces as it does. A 32km smoke trail from the meteorite remains in the sky for hours following. No one is hurt, but everyone is in awe; the “starving artist” next door even comes outside with a sketchbook and starts drawing everything he saw as if he were drawing a story.
You’d be experiencing the same thing citizens of Paseka, a village in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains near Primvore, Russia experienced on February 12, 1945, as The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite descended to Earth at about 14km/s and impacted about 440km from Vladivostok. The citizens of Paseka had just born witness to one of the largest known meteorite showers in history.
The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite has a coarse octahedrite structure and is classified chemically as IIAB. It ‘s composition is 93% iron, 5.9% nickel, 0.42% cobalt, 0.46% phosphorus, and 0.28% sulfur, and the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite also has minor amounts of germanium and iridium. Taenite and kamacite are the dominant minerals, while plessite, troilite, chromite, and schreibersite are minor in the composition.
The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite has been a favorite study of scientists for several decades, with V. G. Fesenkov, chairman of the meteorite committee of the USSR Academy of Science, being the first. Fesenkov estimated the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite’s orbit was ellipse-shaped due to collisions it had with asteroid belts far from the Sun. The Russian Academy of Science still retains many fragments and specimens of the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite, which they continue to research to this day. Scientists have deemed the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite meteoroid to be a “massive fall”, as original estimates of The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite’s size were 900,000kg before it entered Earth’s atmosphere, then between 70,000 and 100,000kg post-entry.
Upon impact, the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite had a strewn field that covered and elliptical radius of a half-mile. Many deep craters were formed as a result, the deepest being 20 feet deep and 85 feet wide. The shattered pieces of The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite fall into two categories: fragmented and regmaglypted. Fragmented pieces were as a direct result of the impact while regmaglypted pieces, distinctive from fragmented pieces by their fusion crusts, broke apart early in the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite’s descent through the atmosphere. The Sikhote-Alin Meteorite’s impact was so massive that many of the fragmented pieces were driven into surrounding trees.
If you were watching the meteorite shower, you’d want to keep a piece of it for yourself and maybe become rich from selling it, right? Others apparently have the same idea; the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite fragments have been favorites on the meteorite collector’s market for years. The earlier starving artist example wasn’t such a stretch, as P. J. Medvedev, an artist who witnessed the meteorite’s fall in 1947, painted several pictures depicting it. On November 20th, 1957, the Soviet Union celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite’s arrival by issuing stamps based on Medvedev’s depiction.
If there was ever such a thing as a “celebrity meteorite”, the Sikhote-Alin Meteorite would be it.
Christopher L. Shelby, M.D.