Meristem: Top Stories

Have you seen any unusual looking rocks in your wheat or barley fields lately? If so, a University of Calgary meteorite specialist might like to talk to you.

Tom Weedmark, a geology student from the University of Calgary, is conducting the Prairie Meteorite Search again this summer. From now until the end of August, Weedmark will visit towns in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to present specimens to interested people so they can learn about the key meteorite characteristics. He'll also be looking at any potential "rock" specimens to see if they really are meteorites.

"Meteorite finds are important because they provide clues about the history of our Solar System," says Dr. Alan Hildebrand, from the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Calgary. "Most meteorites are fragments of asteroids formed at the birth of our solar system, and they provide us with precious insights into its origins."

Each of the past five summers, a field campaign has been organized for the Prairie region to find and study new meteorites.

As the second largest country in the world, Canada is a vast target for meteorites. In the last five years, some 700 meteorites are estimated to have fallen here. However, meteorites are still some of the scarcest material on Earth, much more rare than gold. They are sought after by collectors and researchers alike.

Winnipeg-based rock collector Derek Erstelle is the only person in Canada to have found two meteorites, the first in 1998 near Pinawa and the other in 2002 near Bernic Lake, in Manitoba. Finding more than one meteorite in the same area may indicate that many were carried and left there by glaciers that retreated from Western Canada at the end of the last Ice Age.

"Derek found these where two lobes of the Laurentide ice sheet met about 11,500 years ago," says Hildebrand. "He may have located a meteorite stranding surface where hundreds or thousands of meteorites were concentrated by glacial flow and were dumped in a small area when the ice melted."

Hildebrand says this theory can be tested by determining how long the Bernic Lake and Pinawa meteorites have been on Earth, and by searching for more meteorites in the region near Pinawa.

The annual summer Prairie Meteorite Search is led by Hildebrand of the University of Calgary, Dr. Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario, and Dr. Martin Beech of Campion College at the University of Regina.

The three scientists are members of the Canadian Space Agency's Meteorites and Impacts Advisory Committee (MIAC), Canada's volunteer group charged with the investigation of fireballs and the recovery of meteorites. The Canadian Space Agency is funding the project's field costs for the summer of 2005.

For more information on meteorites and the summer search schedule contact Weedmark at (403) 852-5613 or Hildebrand, at (403) 220-2291 or visit their Website at http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/PMSearch/

Reprintable with permission. Reproduction of this article - in whole or in part, in print or electronic - requires direct permission from Meristem Information Resources, Ltd. Contact Meristem directly to request reprint permission.

Archives

That may not be your average field stone