And with a great fall comes great responsibility. As you all know, both Dave and I held a particular affinity for historic witnessed falls. We talked meteorites and the existential implications our collecting rocks from space on the future generations. His website is filled with photos of people as well as stones and irons.ĭave first emailed me out of the blue in 2007. Dave was as interested in collecting rocks from space as he was in collecting time with the personalities in meteoritics. And without a doubt, the global meteorite community has lost one of its finest. Like many of you, I heard the sad news of Dave Gheesling’s passing through our usual meteorite channels. Its just too bad that meteorites are frosty cold when they fall because if any meteorite deserved to be warm when it fell, it would be Blanket. And the specimen numbers are holding up well since first touched by the paint brush many years ago. The metal flake visible on the cut faces is shiny and mostly free of rust but with mild staining. The rich black crust is still rich and black. Nicely centered, I might add.Īt 111 years old, Blanket looks great for its age. So another specimen number was painted on the smaller piece. Given that there are actually two Me designations on my crusted corner section, I assume this particular specimen was part of a larger numbered piece that when cut, caused the painted specimen number to also be sectioned. The specimen of Blanket in my collection was originally part of the Field Museum collection and contains the Me prefix on the painted specimen number. But there are 11 places named Comet including one in my backyard that I never knew about. According to, there are zero places in the world named Umbrella.Īnd while playing around with place names, I noticed there was nowhere on earth named meteorite, chondrite, or asteroid. Umbrella? Now that would be a good name for a city. So the Blanket meteorite was named after the town of Blanket that was named after Blanket Creek that got its name from a blanket used as an umbrella. And Blanket Creek got it’s name, so says Wikipedia, “ According to tradition, Blanket Creek was named from an incident when a group of Tonkawa Indians sat under blankets to stay dry during a rainstorm.” And the story of Blanket, as much as one can trust the history of such things, has its origins from a local landmark, in this case, Blanket Creek. Some of my favorite are in Colorado including Boulder, Dinosaur, Eagle, Marble, Parachute, and of course Rifle. I’ve always liked towns that have common nouns as their name. And the total known weight of the L6 chondrite named Blanket totals around 5kg.Īnd a thanks again to Frank Cressy and his landmark book From Weston to Creston for providing background on Blanket. The two original stones that the Field Museum acquired weighed 1.5kg and 1.6kg. The Dossey stone ended up in the Smithsonian Collection minus a 180g section Nininger kept for his personal enjoyment. Professor Dossey’s stone, like many meteorites including Blackwell, Oklahoma (written about in the previous edition of the Accretion Desk) spent its childhood on earth working as a doorman. Dossey who grew into Professor Dossey by the time Nininger met him. Nininger continued the search for stones around Blanket and discovered a 2kg stone recovered at the time of the fall by a child named W. While the loss of life and property in the nearby hamlet of Zephyr, Texas was severe, a few folks in Blanket, Texas had the presence of mind to look for, collect, and share several stone meteorites, the largest of which made their way to the Field Museum in Chicago. The simple reason for barely a mention in the local press was because the meteorite fall was preceded earlier that day by a nearby F4 tornado that pretty much destroyed another equally small town 12 miles away. Normally the excitement of a fireball would make the news and keep the conversations animated at the local diner, but not this time. A lone shooting star graced the evening sky of the Lone Star state back in 1909, one of only two witnessed meteorite falls that year.
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