By George Jacobi
John Hankins, in the Joshua’s Trust blog, described our then new Madeline Regan Preserve in Tolland thusly: “a ridge-top trail runs along a glacial esker ridge that parallels the Connecticut Path. From the top of the ridge, you can look down 70 or 80 vertical feet into what looks to be a glacial kettle hole, a closed depression (and vernal pool) that likely resulted from the melting of a large block of glacial ice at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago”. Accidental discoveries expand our view of the world as much as dogged research. The following unbelievable story comes to us from ECSU Geology Professor, April Primavera, who aided a student in cleaning out her grandmother’s attic, and will be featured in Natural History magazine next month.
This shred of a clipping from an extinct local newspaper, rescued from that attic, is changing geologists’ opinions about the formation of that deep depression and its smaller sister just outside our preserve. Those two nights in 1833 should be remembered better. Eyewitness accounts of that year’s Leonid shower said they were “like snowflakes”, “an incessant illumination of the heavens”, and reliable astronomers estimated 72,000 -150,000 meteors per hour. Makes me wish I was around. Not a hoax – you can look up this apocalyptic-appearing episode.
A space rock about basketball-sized could have created that wide and deep hole and might have weighed 40-50 pounds. It would have been a combination of stone, nickel and iron, with a mixture of other elements, and probably was one of the larger pieces that fell to earth that extraordinary night almost 200 years ago.
Meteorite hunters have been around for a long time, but now that rare earth metals are valuable in smart phone manufacturing, their numbers and inquisitiveness have increased. Meteorites contain indium, tantalum, and other similar material from the Asteroid Belt. The potential for asteroid mining is now a serious conversation topic in the space industries. In fact, one hundred meteorites were stolen in 2012 from an astronomy research center in North Carolina. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/28/100-meteorites-stolen-north-carolina/1796871/
If fragments of that shooting star remain in the ground beneath the tadpoles and turtles in the “kettle hole” along the Regan Preserve’s red-blazed esker trail, they belong to Joshua’s Trust. Professor Primavera: “a large fragment was found near the Tolland Stage Road that may have come from the blast hole crater, a specimen full of bubbly scalded iron that others say may be clinker from the boiler of a steam locomotive”. Similar remnants will surely attract hunters looking for a lucrative payday.
We ask members hiking the preserve to be alert until scientists can once again investigate the presence of an astonishing, truly unlikely extraterrestrial object in our midst.
P.S. (An edit from JT): Someone George didn’t mention even suggests there is an extra-terrestrial ship buried in that vernal pool. Happy April 1. 