SALT LAKE CITY — Each year, James Karner travels to Antarctica as principal investigator of the Antarctic Meteorite Search to find and collect meteorites for the world to study. Despite these annual pilgrimages, Karner had never witnessed a meteorite fall. That was until the morning of August 13, 2022, when he and many others heard a loud bang echoing throughout the Salt Lake Valley: the sound of a falling meteorite that eventually crashed onto the beach along the Great Salt Lake South Shore before becoming officially known as the Great Salt Lake Meteorite. “What was unique about this meteorite is that it was seen as a fireball going through the Midwest and the mountain states,” Karner, a U.S.-based meteorite expert and associate research professor in the department of geology, told KSL. “It was really cool to hear the event in my own driveway.” The fire scene was even captured by a Snowbasin Ski Resort webcam and caught the attention of Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who said in a social media post that he heard the boom while jogging in Salt Lake City. Did you hear that loud boom this morning? Our webcams captured this meteor flying over Snowbasin! ☄️ pic.twitter.com/Dgv0W2Vd4H — Snowbasin Resort (@SnowbasinResort) August 13, 2022 Now, a 774-gram fragment of the meteorite, the largest from that cosmic event and about the size of a fist, is on display at the U.S. Sutton Building as the centerpiece of an exhibit that includes videos and interpretive materials that tell the story of the second known “fall.” of Utah. Meteorite. A meteorite fall, Karner explained, is a meteorite whose plummet to Earth was witnessed by people. The one in Utah first occurred in 1950, near Garland in Box Elder County. Karner’s first thought after witnessing the fireball event, naturally, was whether any pieces made it to the ground in the form of meteorites. “There are all kinds of meteorites that fall into the Earth’s atmosphere every day, but most of them are over the oceans,” Karner said. were lucky) to get a rough idea of where possible meteorites might have landed. Pictured is the 774-gram fragment of the Great Salt Lake meteorite. The fragment is displayed in the Department of Geology and Geophysics building at the University of Utah. (Photo: Brian Maffly, University of Utah) “Over the last 20 years… you can see these meteors on Doppler radar. You see the explosion on Doppler radar. You see these meteorites falling to the ground with weather radar, and we can almost pinpoint exactly where they are falling on Earth,” Karner said. Karner sprang into action and quickly contacted a colleague at NASA’s Johnson Space Center who, using weather data from Salt Lake City and Pocatello, Idaho, helped confirm that the meteorites had fallen to the ground after the explosion. The 774-gram Great Salt Lake meteorite was eventually discovered and donated to the US by Arizona-based meteorite hunter Robert Ward. Along with the Great Salt Lake meteorite, Karner said “dozens” of additional fragments were recovered from the 2022 event, and he believes there are still more remains out there. “I suspect there are still pieces of this meteorite on the beach, in the “Actually, the meteorite is not particularly unique. Classified as an “ordinary chondrite”, it shares composition with 80% to 85% of other meteorites. However, by tracing the fireball event that led to the Great Salt Lake meteorite, scientists were able to calculate the fireball’s pre-impact orbit toward the asteroid belt from which it came. It is a significant cosmic event that will happen once in a lifetime. – Jim Karner, research professor at the University of Utah “Because we have the rock that caused it, we can see what the composition is, and then telescopes can link the group of asteroids to that specific meteorite. That hasn’t happened much before. Only about 70 meteorites have had that kind of follow-up. So, we’re actually linking asteroids and families of asteroids to specific meteorites,” Karner said. Aside from the scientific importance of the event, Karner said the Great Salt Lake meteorite deserves to be displayed at the public, calling it “every part of Utah’s natural history.” “It’s a significant cosmic event that will happen once in a lifetime, and I think it’s cool because I’ve talked to a lot of people about this event, and a lot of people in Salt Lake City heard these explosions,” Karner said. “It’s really the oldest thing they’ve ever witnessed. That rock is 4.56 billion years old. The dinosaur bones you find are 60, 65 million years old.” The exhibit was officially unveiled last week inside the main office of the Department of Geology and Geophysics. The office is located just off the second-floor lobby of the Sutton Building, known as Confluence, according to a statement from the U. Key findings in this article were generated with the help of large language models and were reviewed by our editorial team. The article itself is solely written by humans.
