The British and Irish Meteorite Society

The online BBC News magazine have a very nice article on the fall of the Barwell Meteorite, The hunt for the Christmas meteorite.

The biggest meteorite to hit the UK landed in a small village in Leicestershire one Christmas Eve. Fifty years on, the search for its highly valuable fragments is far from over.

The last thing Percy England expected on Christmas Eve was for a 4.5bn-year-old meteorite to put a hole through his brand new Vauxhall Viva...

With a follow-up article from the University of Leicester.

The hunt for the Christmas meteorite

Dr Leigh Fletcher quoted in BBC article about biggest meteorite to hit the UK, which made impact on Christmas Eve, 1965
The hunt for the Christmas meteorite

Credit: BBC Inside Out; In 1965 the biggest meteorite to hit Britain was heading for the East Midlands village of Barwell

An article by the BBC discussing a 4.5bn-year 'Christmas meteorite' - the biggest to hit the UK - which crashed on Christmas Eve, 1965, in the village of Barwell in Leicestershire has quoted Dr Leigh Fletcher from the Department of Physics and Astronomy....

David Entwistle wrote:

Fifty years on, the search for its highly valuable fragments is far from over.

I presume that's not the case, 50 years of British weathering has surely done for them.

Far from it. You have only to consider the Polish meteorite Pultusk (H5 chondrite) - it fell in 1868 but fragments are still being dug up.

I would think that with modern metal detectors finding new fragments of Barwell would be a distinct possibility. The problem is getting permission to hunt..........


Regards, Kieron

Yes...Kieron is right...I have some of the Pultusk fall that has been dug out recently and it still has quite a good fusion crust after all those years in damp ground...Pultusk also has a much higher iron content and has still survived.(I donated some to the OU for weathering tests, comparing the fresh stones recovered at the time to recent finds....there was hardly any change to the O isotopes...eg terrestrialization...I have been metal detecting around Barwell where it was possible to get permission and there is so much slag and iron rubbish around it is almost impossible to progress any distance to search and on top of that the low iron in Barwell makes it almost impossible to detect more than a couple of inches down in the soil....I have done tests burying similar NWA's.

Hope to see some of you tomorrow at the Barwell event...just finishing off packing up space rocks to take along.

Graham

Barwellian wrote:I have been metal detecting around Barwell where it was possible to get permission and there is so much slag and iron rubbish around it is almost impossible to progress any distance to search and on top of that the low iron in Barwell makes it almost impossible to detect more than a couple of inches down in the soil....I have done tests burying similar NWA's.
Graham

Hi Graham,

Just wondering which metal detector you are using. I know this has come up before. I have carried out some testing of my own with a Minelab X-Terra detector and had some promising results.


Regards, Kieron