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| Brenham Pallasite Meteorite |
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| Meteorite
Type: Stoney Iron Classification: Anomalous Pallasite Location: Brenham, Kiowa County, Kansas, U.S.A. Fall Date: ~20,000 years ago Discovered: May, 1882 Total Known Weight: > 4 Tons |
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A Pallasite is a rare form of heavy metallic meteorite. Pallasites are composed of 50 percent nickel and iron alloy and 50 percent of Olivine crystals. Oriented meteorites are said to be the rarest and most coveted type of meteorites. Experts say that one or two thousand years ago, a truck-sized piece of asteroid called the Brenham meteorite exploded over the Kansas prairie, scattering more than three tons of fragments. Most of the remaining fragments are no bigger than a grapefruit. The impact area is called the Brenham meteorite field.For decades, meteorite hunters have searched for these fragments of space rocks. Sometime during the 1920s or 1930s, one such hunter was examining a Kansas field with a low place which was thought to be a buffalo wallow. He found that it was actually an impact crater from a piece of meteorite. Back in the middle to late 1800's as cowboys rode their horses across the prairie in what is now Kiowa County, they came across from time to time heavy black rocks scattered across the buffalo grass. There were no other such stones found else where so the black stones were a bit out of place. The stones were often used for weight lifting and shot-put demonstrations. At the end of the nineteenth century Frank Kimberly brought his wife Eliza Jane to homestead the area. One of the first things she noticed was the black rusty rocks that were about in the area. She informed her husband that the rocks were not ordinary but rather meteorites and began to keep a pile of them near the house they had made. She was often laughed at and kidded as the pile grew larger. The rocks were considered somewhat useful for a number of chores that the locals had in the area as no other rocks were around.As a child in Iowa she and her class were taken to a railroad station to view a great meteorite in transport to an eastern museum. The experience was one she had not forgotten and how the meteorite had looked to her when she was quite young. As Frank plowed the prairie ground he would often plough up new specimens and Eliza would drag them back to the pile, although this was beginning to become an irritation to him as the pile grew. Eliza wrote a number of letters to various places in hopes of finding someone that might be interested in her meteorites. Finally after five years a Dr. F.W. Cragen at Washburn College in Kansas agreed to look at the collection. When he arrived he was amazed and delighted at the pile of specimens and paid her several hundred dollars for the better half of the specimens. This sell was enough to buy a neighboring property where more of the specimens were found. As word got out, other scientists followed Dr. Cragen's lead and came to buy specimens and a brisk market was generated for a number of years. Frank had quickly changed his tune after the first sell his wife had made, and went out prospecting on a more regular basis. Over a ton and a half had been sold just past the turn of the century by the Kimberly's. Their place was known as the Kansas Meteorite Farm. More than three and a half tons total has been recovered from the Brenham fall and no doubt more picked up and not recorded. The largest Brenham meteorite specimen discovered weighed 1,430 pounds, making it the largest Pallasite meteorite ever found in North America and the largest oriented meteorite in the world. |
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