#cherbarkul

Chelyabinsk Chunk

Take a good look at this rock, this is a pretty neat find.You might remember a photo taken in early 2012 from Cherbarkul Lake just outside the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. The winter ice covering the lake had a 6 meter hole in it, produced when debris from the Chelyabinsk meteorite crashed into the lake. You can find that photo and post here: http://tinyurl.com/pcrrcdg.

Scientists have been scouring that lake for pieces of the rock ever since, and this photo suggests they have had some moderate success!

This is a 570 kilogram (1256 pound) chunk of the meteorite that exploded above Chelyabinsk, pulled from the bottom of Cherbarkul Lake. Worth noting, that is a minimum weight; the scale actually broke at that number, so the rock probably is over 600 kilograms. It was about 1.5 meters across at its widest point.

The rock itself fractured while they were trying to weight it. That isn’t terribly surprising; this rock has already had an exciting life. First it was part of an atmospheric explosion, then it crashed into a lake, then it sat at the bottom of a lake for 8 months where water could begin altering it, and finally it was lifted by cranes and divers to the surface.

The rock itself probably isn’t pristine any more. Water alteration actually works that fast on earth; some of the minerals probably altered while sitting on the lake bottom, but still this is a very cool find and is on its way to a museum. It does still have an in-tact fusion crust; a coating on the created when the outer portions of the rock were heated above their melting point due to friction with the Earth’s atmosphere.

A final reminder; this might well have been the piece that created the 6 meter hole in the lake, but this is just a small fragment of the actual meteor. The estimated size of the meteor was something on the order of 15-20 meters (~50-70 feet) and its mass is estimated to be about 10 million kilograms.

-JBB

Image credit: AP Photo/Alexander Firsov http://phys.org/news/2013-10-russia-huge-chelyabinsk-meteor-chunk.html