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Met Name

Met Type

Thin Sections

Peas.   LL5
TKW 1 ton and counting. Observed fall 15 February 2013, in Chelyabinskaya oblast’, Russia.




      ^{About Chely Breccia}

Edwin writes:

Just for fun and your viewing pleasure.

I was an obsessed rockhound at the age of two, hanging from Mom's hand while picking up agates in the gravel along the side of Ellis Avenue where I grew up. I know my age at the time because we were waiting for my brother Mark to come home from kindergarten each day, and he is three years older than me. This was coincidentally just a couple miles from where Ellis Hughes discovered the Willamette meteorite here in Oregon. By the age of six, my bedroom was lined with shelves and cabinets filled with cool rocks.

I received my first meteorite as a gift at that same age. Aunt Ethel had bought it from Harvey Nininger, 272 grams for $1.00! All five kids in my family would do Summer sleepouts and watch for shooting stars. We all learned about falling stars. My favorite place to go for picnic lunches on the way to see Grandpa Fred was the site where a sign was erected telling the legend of the Willamette meteorite.

I had decided that rocks drifting around in Space for millennia, were the 'ultimate rock'! As a teenager, witnessing a major fireball while driving mom's 62' Volkswagen on a cold clear January night, really got me hooked! After contacting several universities and museums, a janitor at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry gave me Dick Pugh's phone number. I learned from longtime friend, science teacher, and fireball chaser, Dick Pugh, that you could hunt for, find, buy, sell, trade, and study meteorites. Dick's collection really got my blood boiling, and his stories were endless fun! He is up there right now, in the heavens, throwing rocks down at us.

Those stories and the books H.H.Nininger had written about finding falling stars inspired my first six month trip to the edge of the Sahara in 1972 at the age of 19. A friend and I hitchhiked across Europe to Algeciras, Spain. We took the Ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangiers and stayed with his sister and her husband in Kenitra, Morocco. Friend Tom spoke fluent Arabic which made most of our time there easy and fun. I took eight years of French in grade school which got us out of a pinch more than once.

As a kid, I dreamed of the Holbrook, Arizona, fall where many thousands of stones fell and were recovered and still are today. So, when I learned of all the tiny stones landing in the snow near Chelyabinsk, Russia, I saw it as my 'once in a lifetime' opportunity to mimic the Holbrook event from a distance. Not having been much of a collector since I started selling my early collection specimens over 40 years ago, the best specimens went on sale with all the rest just to pay the bills.

These photographs represent 10 years of acquiring small, stone, rain drops from the heavens. There are over two hundred thousand stones in this collection. The Erlenmeyer flasks in the foreground are filled with gorgeous, pristine, oriented specimens. There are a few more oriented individuals in the other bottles. I look at these 'Chelly Peas' nearly every day. They reside right next to a perfectly preserved leaf print fossil I dug on a month-long geology summer camp trip at the age of eleven in 1964.

Imagine what it was like to have been out there on the snow, in February of 2013, when many of us were in Tucson, buying, selling, and trading rocks from Space. Imagine the sounds and sights of a black cloud of tiny rocks falling like rain!

Enjoy, E.T.