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It came from outer space. The meteorite that landed in a Cotswolds cul-de-sac. By Helen Gordon. Read by Sasha Frost. At 21.54 on the 28th of February 2021, 16 cameras belonging to amateur sky watching network UK Mon picked up a bright shape headed towards Earth. Pictures show a long white line, which was visible for eight seconds, a glowing globule of light against the dark sky. For me, it's like fishing, said Richard Carcerak.
One of the founders of you came on. You cast your line and then you wait. There are days when you catch nothing, but there are days when you catch a really, really big fish and it's so exciting. The fireball of February 2021 was such a fish. A lump of flaming extraterrestrial rock travelling at a speed of about 8.4 miles a second. 15 times the speed of a rifle bullet.
and headed for the Cotswold market town of Winchcombe. Meteorites are rocks from space that have entered our atmosphere. Most were once part of asteroids. the rocky airless remnants left over from the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Almost all of them are what collectors call finds, meaning that the stone has been discovered by searching the ground.
having fallen earlier. In most cases, several thousand years earlier. A fall, a meteorite that is seen in flight and then recovered, is very, very rare. Worldwide, typically only about 10 such rocks are picked up each year. Before 2021, the last reported UK fall was a rock the size of a cricket ball that landed in the hedge in Glatton in Cambridgeshire in May. 1991. With its woods, heaths, moors and arable farmland, and with so many other terrestrial rocks and pebbles to confuse things.
Most of the UK is terrible meteorite hunting territory. Even so, with enough flight data, you can attempt to calculate a meteorite's trajectory to try to figure out where it has landed. On the 1st of March, the morning after the Fireball, Ashley King, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, NHM, and the lead of the UK Fireball Alliance, UKFool,
began scanning the data from the camera networks. UK4 brings together the different hobbyist camera networks and the professional scientists who want to find and study the meteorites. The scientists studied a map of the Cotswolds and drew an oval shape covering a 280 square kilometre area where parts of a meteorite might have landed. Now the race was on to try to recover the rocks.
As soon as a meteorite enters the Earth's atmosphere, it begins to change, thanks to the effects of oxygen, wind, rain or any other contaminating material. This is why recently fallen meteorites are especially prized. Meteorite collectors term them fresh. The weather in the Cotswolds on the 28th of February and the 1st of March was clear and dry, but it was imperative to reach the meteorite, if it had survived the journey, as soon as possible.
Because the UK was in lockdown, the teams from the NHM, the University of Glasgow and other institutions couldn't immediately travel to Winchcombe. Usually they would try to keep a search area to themselves for three or four days, but now... as King and his colleagues anxiously scanned the weather forecasts. They took the decision to ask the public for help. Once the meteorite speed slows to below three kilometres a second, it stops shining and enters what is called...
dark flight, when it is no longer observable. To work out where it had landed, you have to make various assumptions about what the rock is made of, what shape it is, and what the wind will have done to it. The map of where it could have fallen was released. King spent the day talking to journalists and making announcements on the radio. To minimise contamination, King issued the following instructions to the public.
If you find something that might be a meteorite, take a photograph of it in situ. Record the location. Only handle it wearing gloves. Put it into a sealable plastic bag or some aluminium foil. Email us. The less the meteorite was altered by its stay on Earth, the greater the scientific value would be. Meteorites, because of their great age and because, compared with Earth rocks, they are relatively pristine.
Provide a window back in time through which we might glimpse the processes that formed and shaped the solar system, the moons, the planets and our own world. Most rocks on Earth have been subjected to plate tectonics. the constant destruction and recycling of our Earth's crust, and to weathering on the surface. Any information about the very early Earth has been destroyed. If we want to read those earliest pages of Earth's history,
Meteorites from asteroids are the oldest objects available for study. Without them, we cannot begin to answer the questions. Where did we come from? How did we begin? With a population of 5,000, Winchcombe is a pretty town of honeycombed coloured limestone and timber frame buildings. The Wilcock family home is a neat 1960s detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac.
on the outskirts of town. Early in the morning of the first of March, Catherine Wilcock, a retired primary school teacher, opened the curtains of her living room and noticed a pile of dark lumps and powder at the edge of her driveway. It looked as though someone had upended an old barbecue. The Winchcombe meteorite had probably travelled more than a hundred million miles to reach our planet. Had it landed just a few metres to the left,
it would have fallen into a thick privet hedge and probably never been discovered. Had it landed a few metres closer to the road, Catherine would have assumed it was rubbish churned up by a passing car and swept it away. Instead... her husband Rob went out to investigate. Rob immediately recognised that something strange had occurred. He got together some rubber gloves, old yoghurt pots and plastic bags and went outside to pick up the stones.
The NHM and other institutions that deal with meteorites are used to fielding inquiries from people who think they found a space rock. Among the scientific meteorite community, such rocks have their own name. meteor wrongs. Randy L. Korotev, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has a webpage devoted to them.
I have examined thousands of photos that people have sent to me over the past 20 plus years. Probably for less than one in 1,000 photos have I thought, yes, that might be a meteorite. He has written with some exasperation. Slag is a particular issue. A glassy by-product of smelting ores to retrieve metal. It looks a bit like what your idea of a meteorite might be. Dark and gnarly, something forged with fire.
As a meteorite enters the Earth's atmosphere, slowing down, it begins to rapidly cool, and its molten surface forms a dark, glassy coating called a fusion crust. Unlike a meteorite... Slag has large vesicles, holes caused by gas bubbles when the rock was originally cooling, and no fusion crust. Another challenge is that when people see a fire in the sky, they tend to assume that it's very close to them.
In reality, because the meteorite is high in the sky and therefore visible across vast swathes of land, it may be very far away. With the Winchcombe meteorite... King had photographs of rocks sent in from places as distant as Scotland. The NHM scientists were swamped with replies. So when, around 4pm on the Monday, King viewed an email with a photograph of someone's driveway. He was initially suspicious. The photograph showed some dark black lumps, surrounded by dark black powder.
It was a sort of splat shape you might expect if something fell to the ground from a great height. I have to admit that I wasn't absolutely convinced at first, King said. That splat shape. It was a little bit too perfect. You do get people who will fake things. It's a weird thing to do, but it happens, he said. What were the chances of the meteorite landing so neatly and conveniently in front of someone's house? According to the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, statistically,
You have to wait for a billion years before your home will be hit by a meteorite. But fake or not, King wanted to get his hands on the potential meteorites as quickly as possible. In addition to the weather, there was another reason to hurry. With news of the meteorite all over the internet, professional meteorite hunters would be alerted to the scene.
Here, the Covid lockdown was in some ways a piece of good fortune. Otherwise, we could have been overrun with big meteorite hunters from abroad, King told me. These are the sorts of people who can jump on a plane at a moment's notice to get to the site of a suspected fall. On 2 March, Richard Greenwood, a scientist at the Open University,
sat down at his desk to see what King had sent him. Rob Wilcox's picture was the first image he opened. To be honest, it was like one of those moments when your legs start going wobbly because I saw this thing. And I just thought... That is a meteorite, he told the BBC. It was instantaneous. By the 3rd of March, King was negotiating with the NHM and the government to get permission to travel to the Cotswolds.
Greenwood, who lives near Winchcombe, set off as soon as he could. When he arrived at the Wilcox house, Rob came out holding a plastic bag. It was the second wobbly moment of the day. I looked inside and I could not believe it, Greenwood said. Not only was there a meteorite in the bag, it looked to be a very, very unusual one. A carbonaceous chondrite.
comprising only about 4% of all meteorite falls. These are among the most primitive and pristine of space rocks. They are also rich in water and organic material. Some scientists believe that carbonaceous chondrites were responsible for delivering the first water to our planet. Without meteorites, so the theory goes, there would be no rivers or oceans, lakes or streams.
Some also believe that the organic material they contain, amino acids and other prebiotic molecules, could have combined with simple molecules such as ammonia and carbon dioxide to create the first... proteins and RNA molecules. The blueprint to build and operate every living entity on Earth. There is just literally the country's most interesting meteorite in 400 years. And I'm the first person who knew that's what it was, Greenwood told reporters. It was very hard to contain the emotions.
Thanks for listening to The Guardian Long Read. We'll be back after this. I'm The Guardian Science Editor, Ian Sample, and host of The Guardian Science Weekly Podcast, where I explore the news, breakthroughs, and discoveries in health, tech, the environment, and so much more. Just search for Science Weekly wherever you get your podcasts and hit subscribe.
The Brit School is nurturing the next generation of breakthrough talent. Like me, 2024 graduate rapper and still pan player, Ramaya. My sound is old school hip hop with a new twist. I write lyrics that explore tough life experiences with melodies from my Caribbean culture. Thanks to The Brit School and Mastercard, I'm turning dreams of becoming an artist into my future. To find out more about Mastercard's work with The Brit School,
visit mastercard.co.uk slash Brits. This message was paid for by Mastercard. At EDF, we don't just encourage you to use less electricity. We actually reward you for it. That's why when you use Leicester in peak times on weekdays, we give you free electricity on Sundays. How you use it is up to you. EDF. Change is in our power.
Households who ship weekday peak usage by 40% could earn up to 16 hours of free electricity per week, subject to fair usage cap. For all T's and C's, visit edfenergy.com forward slash r-power. Welcome back to The Guardian Long Read. News began to ripple through the meteorite community. Minutes after Greenwood met Wilcock,
Luke Daly from the University of Glasgow posted in a group chat, holy sh**, just got off the phone with Ashley King. And Richard Greenwood met with one of the black rock finders and reckons it's a CM chondrite. Ashley's on his way now. Don't spread this. Having travelled for nearly four hours on eerily empty tubes and trains from South London, King arrived in Winchcombe.
Because of lockdown rules, the Wilcox set up a small table on the patio to look at his finds. Watching their faces light up, I started to realise for the first time that this was something really special. Rob Wilcock told me. The enormity of what had taken place was beginning to sink in. Two days later he looked on as some of the most important names in meteoritics crawled over his front lawn-wielding tweezers. Rob had already collected further fragments.
and built a little protective structure around the area of the driveway where the main mass of the meteorite, the largest section, had landed. Now he was sent up a ladder to check the flat roof for material. Even tiny specks were worth collecting. Catherine gave the scientists some old toothbrushes to help sweep up the grains. Later... The scientists cut out the square of driveway where the meteorite had landed and transported it to London. There, they attempted to recover more fragments.
The tarmac itself would feature in the museum archives, along with the plastic bags and Waitrose yoghurt pots that Rob had used to collect the meteorite. In total, 319... 0.5 grams of the meteorite was recovered from the Wilcox property. They donated everything to the NHM, the Winchcombe Museum and the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum in Cheltenham.
It just seems to have really found the right people to fall on, King said of the Wilcox. It couldn't have been any better. Meanwhile, King finally received the data from the dark flight model. They now had a potential stream field, a much smaller, more searchable area where larger pieces of the meteorite could have landed and remained intact. New hunts were organised.
Scientists and student volunteers spread out two metres apart in lines like police at a crime scene. They walked slowly over the cold fields. Heads down, looking for small black stones that had travelled to Earth from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It was hard going. Many possible meteorites turned out to be lumps of sheet droppings.
Meteorite hunter and collector Luther Jackson describes this sort of hunt as a mixture of science and detective work. For instance, stream fields typically have what hunters call a big and a small end. The big end is where larger pieces fall first. The small end is where the smaller pieces, which are lighter and therefore travel further, will land. Within the streamfield, Jackson will look for likely places to hunt.
Anywhere with a very uniform surface, such as a football pitch or tennis court, is good. He makes a point of talking to everyone he meets. You never know what information will come up, or offers from people to let you search their land. Often he brings a stick with a magnet attached to test rocks. Not all meteorites are magnetic. Those from the moon, for example, are not. But most are being rich in iron.
Some scientists discourage the use of magnets because they can erase any record of the magnetic field of the meteorite's parent body. It's slow, back-breaking work. In Winchcombe, The scientists' efforts were finally rewarded when Mira Ihaz, a volunteer with the University of Glasgow search team, found a stone weighing 152 grams, the largest intact piece. The main mass recovered from the Wilcox driveway was not intact, having fractured into millimetre to centimetre sized pieces and powder.
If the British countryside, with its rain, mud, vegetation, sheep's droppings and so on, is far from ideal meteorite hunting territory, the Sahara is its opposite. Dark meteorites stand out against the sand, and even very old falls are often well preserved in the dry desert climate, meaning there are an estimated tens of...
of thousands of years worth of fallen meteorites waiting to be discovered. Towards the end of the 20th century, these facts, combined with a favourable legal and geopolitical situation, and the presence of many skilled local hunters, often members of nomadic groups, turned Morocco into one of the world's greatest exporters of space rocks.
The UK has recorded a mere 23 falls and fines. The number of officially recognised Moroccan meteorites exceeds a thousand, though this is described by scientists as a gross underestimate. Many meteorites collected in Morocco are not precisely documented and so not attributed specifically to that country. The majority are only submitted for official recognition when they are perceived to have sufficient commercial value.
At an auction in 2022, a bean-sized 1.7 gram fragment of the Winchcombe meteorite went for £9,256. 120 times the value of its weight in gold. In a general way, meteorites can cost anything from a few pounds to hundreds of thousands. Their value largely determined by the collecting community. In recent years, as meteorites have grown in popularity, prices have shot up, about which the dealers had mixed feelings. Higher prices are obviously good for the seller.
but many people complained to me particularly about the rocketing prices commanded by really fresh fools, taking interesting new meteorites out of the reach of the general collecting community. In Morocco... News of a new meteorite fall is liable to bring hundreds of people to the most inhospitable desert locations. Many will be inexperienced and ill-prepared, sometimes with tragic results.
In 2017, there was a fall in July when it was extremely hot and the military told us that two people died because they didn't have enough water and they didn't know where they were. a professor at the Hassan II University of Casablanca told me. In 1980s Morocco, when Chenowee was studying for a geology degree,
The subject was considered an exclusively male pursuit. Today, she is one of the country's leading meteorite authorities, though she is often still the only woman on trips into the Sahara to hunt for meteorites. Back in 2011, she received a call from the Meteoritical Society, the group that maintains the official register of all known meteorites.
asking her to travel to a remote part of southern Morocco near the border with Algeria. There were rumours that a black rock had fallen from the sky. Some reports claimed... that it was an incredibly rare meteorite type. Shenui accepted the mission. In addition to the risk of getting fatally lost in an often seemingly featureless landscape,
Dangers include, but are not limited to, scorpions, snakes, shifting sand dunes and buried landmines. You have to go to the field with people that have a good knowledge of the area. And you have to trust them. I cannot go into the desert with someone that I've never travelled with before, Shenui said. To reach the site of the 2011 fall required a five-hour, 45-mile drive along a rocky desert track.
We were in the middle of nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. And when we arrived at the site, we found hundreds and hundreds of people. Men, women, children. People had heard there were rocks coming from the sky and that they had value. Though she personally found only tiny fragments of the meteorite that together weighed much less than one gram,
Shenawi conducted interviews, documented locations and saw stones found by other meteorite hunters. The stones looked as though they'd been dipped in black vinyl. I have never seen anything so nice in my life. The fusion crust is so shiny and very black, she said in an interview for Life Science. Altogether... Seven kilograms of the meteorite were collected. On the 17th of January, 2012, the Meteoritical Society formally added the meteorite to their register. It was named Tissant.
after the village nearest to the full site. Most exciting of all was where this meteorite was found to have originated, the planet Mars. It is stupendously rare to witness a fall from Mars. Fewer than 0.3% of meteorites in collections are from the Red Planet. And like Winchcombe... Tissant is distinguished by having fallen in a dry area and been picked up soon afterwards with minimal contamination. Chenowee was the lead author on the first Tissant report.
working with 20 researchers from different countries. She was even able to see evidence of weathering that had occurred on Mars' surface. It was almost as if it had just been blasted off the surface of Mars. Meteorite hunting can be a frustrating pastime. You might have access to camera footage and sophisticated weather data or live next to an optimum meteorite hunting site.
but you can't influence when a space rock will decide to drop in. At a meteorite show in France, I met Thierry Montet, a French meteorite dealer and graphic designer. On his stand was a semicircle of tarmac that, on closer inspection, turned out to be part of a tennis court. In February 2023, Monte was abroad, on holiday with his girlfriend. when he heard about a new meteorite fall back in France. It was just horrible, he told me. The worst vacation of my life.
I was waiting for years for a meteorite fall and then it happened in France and I wasn't there. I was checking the news every day and watching as pieces were found. As soon as he arrived home... Montes set out for the full site in Saint-Pierre-la-Vigère in Normandy. He was seven days late and knew that most of the decent spots would already have been picked over but decided to try his luck on a local tennis court.
A good place to hunt because there was a large, flat surface with no grass or bushes. I saw something that looked like gravel, but there was a sparkle on it. He found his first meteorite. Then he found some more and then some more. In total, he collected about 400 grams in many pieces, some of which he was selling at the show. Because it had smashed apart on impact.
You could see the dark black fusion crust on the outside and a creamy interior studded with rust-coloured spots. He was also selling the very, very small impact crater that the meteorite had made on the tennis court. I am not rich. Quite the contrary, in fact. And if I earn some big money, I could turn being a meteorite dealer into my job, he said.
The fact that the meteorite had landed in France of all countries made it even more significant. When, out of all the places on the planet a meteorite could land, it lands in our place. The vast otherness of space comes into direct contact with our Earth-bound, everyday lives. Recently, a bright fireball was sighted over the English Midlands.
The chair of a greenhouse factory in Cresswell, a village in the middle of the search area, was interviewed by the press. We were just amazed that such a thing could happen in our little corner of Staffordshire, he said. In Winchcombe. the Wilcox have installed a small metal plaque on their driveway to commemorate the place their meteorite landed. Wherever they fall, These remarkable, unlikely stones seem to demand from us an act of witness. This incredible thing, it happened here.
A wooden post in Essex commemorates the 1923 Ashton meteorite. A brick pillar in Yorkshire, the 1795 World Cottage Fall. A sculpture in Alsace, the 1492. Ensysheim event. Such monuments seek to fix in place and time something transient. They speak of a desire to recognize that here, in this place, On this specific spot the fabric of the everyday world was briefly pulled aside.
Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Long Read. That was It Came From Outer Space The meteorite that landed in a Cotswolds cul-de-sac by Helen Gordon Read by Sasha Frost and produced by Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Ellie Bury. Adapted from The Meteorites. Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Time by Helen Gordon. Published by Profile. For more Guardian Long Reads in text and a selection in audio, go to theguardian.com forward slash long read.
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