Meteor!

[ReinyDays]

That depends on if it's a rocky one or metallic.

This would be solid pure iron ... maybe some nickel mixed in ... not steel, pure iron ... there's a piece at the Barringer Meteor Crater visitor center off The I-40 we can fondle if we want ... any other type of asteroid would have burned up high in the atmosphere ... or exploded like in the USSR a few years ago ...

So far, media is silent as to any discoveries at the California site ... my guess is his house cat knocked over his arc welder into his collection of old phone books ... and that set afire all the naked sheep posters on his walls ... weather at the time was breezy, mid-60's and about 70% humidity, exactly the same as 500 years ago and as it will be 500 years hence ... climate isn't changing ... see, it's meteors that are the problem ..

 

[norwegen]

No ... meteors are bitter cold ... deep space cold ... alone they cannot start fires ... broken natural gas lines and short-circuiting electric wiring will certainly start house fires ... and your insurance should cover that ...

They burn up entering the atmosphere, do they not?

 

[ReinyDays]

They burn up entering the atmosphere, do they not?

They explode ... except for the more uniform chucks of solid iron ... what we see burning is the outer layers of material ... these are shed in the decent, along with the heat of friction ... what remains is still bitter cold ... there's not enough time for the heat to penitrate into the meteor itself ...

Hollywood gets that wrong ... meteorites come to rest on frozen lakes because they are colder than the ice ... that can be inferred from this article "... meteorite that fall on frozen lake" ... if that piece was hot, why would it be sitting on top of the snow? ...[/URL]