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Met Name

Met Type

Thin Sections

298 grams.   H5

TKW 700 kg. Fall not observed. Found 1917, Texas, USA.

 

Steve writes:

Other than a few observed falls, only 22 recognized meteorite finds had occurred in the whole of the United States prior to 1917. It was in that year that farmer Harl Rightmire sent four “unusually heavy” stones totaling about 16 pounds to the U.S. National Museum for analysis. Because they were determined to be meteorites, Rightmire was paid to search for more. Over the next two years, about a dozen other pieces were found and sent to the Smithsonian, each averaging around 5 pounds. Rightmire felt the search was finally complete, so a scientific paper describing the fall was subsequently written by Dr. George P. Merrill.

A decade later, Dr. Harvey H. Nininger met with Merrill to ask his thoughts on whether additional stones might be found. Although Merrill was adamant there were no more, he told Nininger “to help himself.” So in December of 1933, after Nininger and his brother John were returning from a fruitless search in Mexico for a purported 50 pound meteorite, they decided to book a hotel in the Plainview area to look there. The pair drove into the countryside and began knocking on farmers’ doors, offering a dollar a pound to anyone that might have any unusual stones in their possession. At the fourth farmhouse, the Niningers waited while the owner retrieved an eight-pound meteorite that had been sitting in their courtyard for many years. Now suspicious there might be more, Nininger and his brother renewed their door-knocking the next morning, and by the end of the day they had found another 26 specimens weighing a combined 152 pounds.

In all, more than 900 pieces totaling 1,600 pounds have been recovered in a 16-mile-long by 4-mile-wide strewn field south of Plainview. There are debates regarding the date of the actual Plainview fall. Rightmire had possession of his stones for years, suggesting it might have been related to a 1903 bolide reported by several witnesses at the time. But in 1872, several fireballs were also seen over the skies of Plainview, likely accounting for the “strange rocks” that have been found south of the city since the late 1800s. Additionally, a secondary Dimmitt Fields strewn field lies east of Plainview, crossing the Plainview strewn field at an angle that implies it might be from a second meteorite. And there are other strewn fields near Edmonson, Floydada, Hale Center, Kress, and Tulia, suggesting several meteorites may have fallen in this part of Texas (a suspicion corroborated not simply because the strewn fields appear distinctly separate, but also by variations in the collected materials, with the Floydada field even yielding nickel-iron meteorites).

Plainview is an H5 chondrite regolith breccia stone meteorite with carbonaceous inclusions and a 27% metal content. The original meteoroid was suspected to have been a car-sized, 10-ton asteroid, and it’s estimated that as much as 90 percent of it still waits to be found. The 298 gram piece shown here is partially fusion-crusted and includes broken edges and a polished end that demonstrates the classic brecciation of this early Texas meteorite.