Atomic Shrimp - Prospecting For Micro Meteorites

Prospecting For Micro Meteorites

Collecting Meteorites

Unless you happen to be lucky enough to be close to a meteorite when it falls (and lucky enough not to be too close), collecting meteorites can be quite difficult - apparently, they're sometimes not so hard to find by eye on glaciers or other large expanses of ice, and also on desert plains.

But for smaller micrometeorites like these, prospecting with a magnet is a pretty reliable method, all you need is a strong magnet, wrapped in plastic to make your finds easier to remove, and a way of checking a large area that has been exposed to the sky.

Obviously, roof drainage systems are ideal for this - and in my case, the job was made easier by the blockage - that filtered and trapped all the solids that ran off the roof for a year or two.

In the case of normally-working drainage systems, a bagged magnet could be suspended by a string inside the downpipe and checked after heavy rains, or if the rainwater is being collected for use in the garden, the settled sediment in the bottom of the barrel or water butt would be a good place to dangle your magnet.

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January 2009 - My roof gutter downpipes are blocked and keep overflowing - in fact, they've been like that for a year or more - clearing them out is a job I've put off for too long, due to the perilous three-storey climb.

So I decided to see if I could bring a small reward out of that peril - and see if I can recover some micrometeorites from the material that's causing the blockage.

This downpipe is one of only three serving the whole roof of a terrace of five houses - that's quite a large collection area, conveniently funnelled through a small channel - ideal for meteorite prospecting.

The blockage turned out to be caused by a small oak seedling, growing in the top of the downpipe - there was another at the back of the house - an ash seedling there, presumably from a wind-blown seed.

Fortunately for the meteorite prospecting, the roots of these trees had trapped a great chunk of soil - the remains of decomposed leaves, wind-blown dust and hopefully some other things...

I washed the soil off the tree roots into a bucket, then mixed it up, breaking up any clods and removing any large pieces of organic matter.

My prospecting kit was made from a very powerful rare earth magnet - harvested from a dead computer hard drive, wrapped in thick polythene and tied up with a cable tie.

These magnets need handling with a little respect - they will fly together (or to a ferrous metal object) with such force as to be able to cause injury.

I swished the magnet around in the water, making sure to thoroughly stir up the sediment at the bottom and expose it to the magnet as much as possible.

After a minute or so, I removed the magnet and was quite surprised to see how much material it seemed to have picked up.

Indoors, I carefully cut the plastic away from the magnet, lifting it away by the edges so as not to slide the captured material off onto the bare magnet.

I took a little of the material, put it on a microscope slide, added a drop of water and spread it out.

Under The Microscope

Looks like quite a positive result - At 60x magnification, lots of little rounded metallic objects can be seen.

These are iron meteorites! - little bits of metal, from space!

And here's one of them at 200x magnification.

Approximately one tenth of the material recovered by the magnet was composed of these little balls of metal - the rest consisted of irregular fragments - these might be pieces of iron from the clay roof tiles, or the nails holding them in place, or may be the rusted, unrecognisable remains of older micrometeorites

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