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3.72 grams. 20 x 17 x 12 mm.   L6

TKW 61.4 grams. Observed fall 13 May 1981, Salem, Marion County, Oregon, USA.


Steve writes:

This particular piece is small – at only 20 x 17 x 12 mm, it’s a mere 3.72 grams – and as an L6 breccia, Salem is far from a rare classification. It is somewhat distinguished by being the fifth of only six classified meteorites from Oregon, the first of only two Oregon chondrites, and Oregon’s only observed fall. It’s also a hammer stone. But what makes this little gem unique is the fact that out of the more than 60,000 meteorites found to date, Salem is the only one shown to have encountered Earth more than once.

On May 13^th, 1981, Marion County sheriff Jim Price had just finished his swing shift. At 1:05 a.m. while sitting on the curb in front of his Salem, Oregon house and talking with an on-duty sheriff in his patrol car, he heard a fluttering noise just before something hit and bounced off the roof of his house. Since no light or other related phenomena were observed, he initially assumed it was a rock flung from the mischievous neighbor boy’s homemade slingshot. But minutes later, when Price picked up his first piece from the street in front of his driveway, he found it to be oddly cold.¹ Also noticing what appeared to be fusion crust, his college training in physics and geology helped him immediately recognize it as a fragment from an obviously larger meteorite. So the next morning he searched and found four more pieces: one on the driveway leading to his garage; another in the gutter on the front of the garage; a third on the back of the garage roof; and a final piece in the street not far from the earlier morning’s find that, unfortunately, had been run over by a car.

Price brought his finds to work the next day and began piecing the fragments together. Three formed what appeared to be a half stone that in total would have been about the size of a tennis ball. The other two pieces connected to each other, but they did not fit with the prior three. Still, in total the five appeared to comprise about two-thirds of an oriented meteorite with shock veins and fusion crust that was, in parts, as much as an eighth of an inch thick. When Price realized pieces were obviously missing he hurried home in hopes of finding more, but not before seeing a street sweeper just down the street from his house that likely already swept up the remaining bits. Additional searches later that afternoon turned up no new material; however Price did notice a 6 cm irregular chip out of a shingle on his roof apparently made by the intact meteorite’s initial impact.² This information and the lack of light or sharp claps accompanying its fall suggested Salem was a slow traveling meteorite that came from the southwest with a low angle of trajectory.

Within two months a sample was undergoing testing at the United States Department of Energy’s Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory.³ Initial inspection revealed a relatively thick fusion crust for such a small object, indicative of a primary stone as opposed to part of a shower. SEM and XRF examinations of two small chips suggested Salem was a relatively rare LL5 amphoterite, but later chemical analyses would change that to a more common L6 breccia classification.

Especially intriguing though were multidimensional gamma-ray spectrometry ²⁹Al and ⁵⁶Co counts that were thirty to fifty times higher than expected for a stone this size – results that indicated a solar cosmic ray exposure not previously seen in a meteorite.⁴ These and subsequent findings from other researchers’ studies provided evidence that Salem had actually made more than one pass through Earth’s atmosphere, with all but the last creating the lower layers of fusion crust that then experienced cosmic ray exposure after the meteor skipped back into space (Salem has as many as five layers of fusion crust in spots). Studies also suggested only about 1 cm of material ablated during Salem’s final fall to Earth, counter to its shallow trajectory that normally ablates more material in a prolonged fall, but likely instead a consequence of its low velocity as evidenced by no obvious fireball or sonic booms.

As can be seen in the photos, Salem is obviously an oriented meteorite that exhibits a rollover lip and frothy fusion crust on its trailing side. Surprisingly, layered fusion crust does not appear on all sides of the meteorite. Given Salem is believed to be a single stone and not part of a shower, no clear explanation has yet been posed describing its flight dynamics and corresponding fusion crust formation during its multiple passes through Earth’s atmosphere.

The majority of Price’s original 61.4 grams of meteorite fragments have been ground up by research institutes. CML (Cascadia Meteorite Labs) formerly owned most of the original five fragments, but after distributing small samples to several other researchers in various labs, they returned the largest remaining pieces to Price. CML, the Smithsonian, and UCSD all still have very small bits, but this 3.72 gram crusted fragment – originally broken off of one of the bigger ones – is the largest remaining piece of this unique meteorite.


¹ An article in Oregon Geology (reference 2) described Price as noting the meteorite was hot upon first picking it up – this is one of several errors in that article that Price pointed out several years ago when selling the piece in these photos to Edwin Thompson (who I later acquired it from). As many know, meteorite temperatures are near absolute zero in space and as soon as they land, their frigid internal temperatures can flash cool the hot fusion crust, often creating contraction cracks and even causing frost to form in some cases.

² library.state.or.us/repository/2010/201009071430032/1983-06.pdf

³ www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc1987/pdf/1138.pdf

⁴ articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1990Metic..25R.392N&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf