A boulder in the river bed
Daji Town is located in the south of Zezhou County and north of Jincheng City 15km. 200 1, the original Daji Township and Nanxi Township merged into a big market town. The total area of the town is 13 1.9 square kilometers. The discovered boulder is located in the riverbed at the east end of Daji Village in Daji Town, and Xu Ying Bridge, a key cultural relic protection unit in Jincheng City, is located in the east.
This morning, the reporter and Zhang Jianjun, a cultural relic expert from Jincheng, came to Daji Village, Daji Town for a field interview. After the villagers pointed out, the reporter soon saw a big pit on the bed of Daji River in the east of the village, in which stood a boulder covered with rainproof cloth. Looking around, a warning line was set up, and a monitoring device was installed on another bluestone in the riverbed, and the probe was aimed at the boulder standing on the riverbed.
Knowing the arrival of cultural relics experts, Zhao Bing, director of Daji Village Committee, rushed to the scene and entered the riverbed pit with Zhang Jianjun.
"This stone is 4.8 meters high and has a circumference of 14 meters," Zhao Bing said. Because of the huge shape of the wrapped stone, it is difficult to remove all the tarpaulins covering it, and only the tarpaulins under the boulder can be removed. Zhang Jianjun leaned over the bare boulder and carefully observed its surface. It was found that this boulder was made of materials of different shapes and colors. Some surfaces are smooth and tidy, while others are mottled and pitted with small holes.
The reporter opened the tarpaulin, drilled under the covered boulder and watched it at close range. The whole boulder is different in composition and color. Some surfaces are mixed with sand, while others are caked. Picking up the same piece of gravel and holding it in your hand, not only does it feel heavier than a stone of similar size, but it is also very hard.
Ma, deputy secretary of the Party branch of Daji Village, is 63 years old. "This is not an ordinary stone. When I was a child, I heard from the old man in the village that a' star' fell from the sky a long time ago. " He said: "When I was young, the old people in the village often said that if you climb the stars and play, the children will be healthy and strong."
"I thought that the Daxie River with meteorites in the past was very clear and could be bathed." Ma clearly remembers that before 1976, the boulder in this riverbed was more than 1 meter above the ground. It was quite troublesome for him to climb up at that time. "Later, when the village filled the river to make farmland, it buried the boulder with soil."
With the passage of time, the boulder was gradually forgotten by the villagers. But since last year, with the rise of local global tourism, a large group of villagers with no resources on the ground brainstormed, and some old people in the village suddenly remembered the boulder at the eastern end of the village. Since last summer, Zhao Bing has organized people to look for places to bury boulders in the riverbed. Because there was no exact location, the search didn't go well at first. At the beginning of July of that year, with the increase of excavation area, the exact location of the boulder was found.
Unexpectedly, as soon as the boulder fell, thieves came to steal and dig at night. For safety, the villagers backfilled the soil and protected the boulder. It was not until last winter that the whole boulder came to light again.
B "whisperd" weighs about 150 tons.
In order to find this boulder, Daji Village spent more than 300,000 yuan. For Daji Village, where money is tight, what Zhao Bing wants to know more is: Is this boulder a meteorite? When did it fall into the big basket?
"According to our ancestors, we can't tell how many generations it has. It is said that a' star' fell on the beach of Dajidong River. " Ma said that the old people told me that Daji Village used to be a village with thousands of people. After the "Star" dropped, Fiona Fang suffered a disaster for dozens of miles, which was equivalent to a magnitude 20 earthquake. So the old people in the village still remember that there is a "star".
Zhang Jianjun graduated from the History Department of Shanxi University, majoring in archaeology, and has been engaged in local archaeological work. "It's strange that such a huge rock appears in the river bed." He carefully surveyed the environment around the boulder and found many "braised soil" geological soil layers and other landforms, which were consistent with the formation of meteorites after falling. On top of these geological layers, there are well-defined riverbed geological layers. "These conditions should be caused by the extremely high temperature and burning when the extraterrestrial meteorite falls to the ground." He believes that this boulder is undoubtedly "whisperd" and "a meteorite similar to glacial sedimentary rocks".
Zhang Jianjun's statement is quite similar to Pan Shuxiang, the general consultant of the International Meteorite Association specially invited by Daji Village some time ago.
According to Zhao Bing, Pan Shuxiang thought that this boulder was a water-ice inclusive falling object from Mars through instrument detection. It is inferred that this behemoth is water-ice inclusive and very large in the process of falling. When it fell to the ground, the ice had not melted, and the falling glacier was hexagonal in diameter and harder than steel and stone. In the process of falling, the high temperature of 600℃ to 1200℃ can be formed, forming a very huge shock wave.
According to the measurement, this boulder is 4.8 meters high and its circumference is 14 meters. "If we measure the same volume of stone on our earth, the weight of this stone is about 150 ton." Zhao Bing said.
"If a meteorite of this weight falls to the earth, it will bring great disasters such as earthquakes around the falling place." What puzzled Zhang Jianjun was that such an important event caused social life, but there was no corresponding record in Jincheng historical records.
When chatting with Zhao Bing, Ma and others, I accidentally learned that the white dustpan was surrounded by mountains and climbed up the mountain when I left the door. The terrain is like a bowl, and the white dustpan is the bottom of the bowl. "This is a typical landform formed after the meteorite fell to the earth." Zhang Jianjun asked: "In this way, in addition to this giant meteorite and small meteorites scattered around it, there should be similar large meteorites around Daji Village."
Hearing this, Zhao Bing took it over and said, "I heard the old man in the village say that there is also a huge stone in Oak Village, two or three kilometers west of Daji Village. Unfortunately, I have never found it. " In the process of digging and looking for boulders, Zhao Bing often wandered around the construction site. He saw strange stones different from the surrounding mountains, so he picked them up and kept them in the village Committee like a treasure.
C original flavor in situ protection
According to Pan Shuxiang's field monitoring, this meteorite contains 45 elements, 17 rare earth trace elements. The highest content in meteorites is iron.
In the 1990s, many small ironmaking plants were built in Daji village, and people in the village also took "iron ore" from the riverbed around the meteorite to make iron. "As a result, iron is not refined, but it often' grows a furnace'." Ma's "long furnace" means that although meteorites are rich in iron, they cannot be melted by a small blast furnace because of their extremely high melting point. As a result, the molten iron can not flow out, resulting in "intestinal obstruction" of the small blast furnace. This phenomenon just confirms that this huge stone is undoubtedly the "whisperd".
In order to find this boulder in the village, Daji Village used large equipment such as excavators to dig. Now it has formed a building area of more than 200 square meters, including 40 to 50 square meters around the meteorite. Due to the high-temperature burning of meteorites, the nearby soil layer was burned red, while the bluestone was burned white, and many broken meteorites of different materials were scattered around. Unexpectedly, in the process of searching for meteorites, two books, Gong Weizao's Records of Xu Ying Bridge and Notes on Bridge Repair, were dug up in the riverbed in the 12th and 13th years of Qing Emperor Kangxi.
"The matter in the universe is similar to that on the earth. The trace of the meteorite falling into the earth when it burns is the environment where the celestial body falls, which not only has protective value for the meteorite, but also has more protective value for the surrounding environment. " Zhang Jianjun suggested that similar methods should be used to protect the Terracotta Warriors, and the metamorphic effects of meteorites on the surrounding rocks, including the impact of craters and iron on the surrounding environment, that is, the phenomenon of celestial falling, should be completely preserved and presented to the world as a base for astronomical science popularization. "With the Xu Ying Bridge, a cultural relic of the Qing Dynasty, a complete popular science and human landscape can be formed." He said: "Historically, Xu Ying Bridge was a passage of the ancient tea-horse road in Wan Li."
According to online inquiry, the heaviest and largest meteorite in the world is the Hoba meteorite in Namibia. Named after the place where it was found, this meteorite has a surface area of over 6.5 square meters and weighs about 60 tons. The largest and heaviest meteorite in China is the iron meteorite named "Silver Camel" found in Qinghe County, Xinjiang. It is irregularly conical, with a volume of 3.5 cubic meters and a weight of about 30 tons.
"I haven't investigated the origin of the name' Daji'. Is it possible that the legendary fallen' star' was named after the' jumping star' of 28 nights? " There is a saying that the terrain of the big dustpan is high in the west and low in the east, which is shaped like a big dustpan, hence the name. In this regard, Zhang Jianjun disagreed: "Ancient place names contain mystery, and the shape of the big bowl is a crater, which is related to the crater. Just like the recognized crater in Xiuyan County, Liaoning Province, that place is called' Luoquanli'. Of course, this circular terrain should rule out the cause of volcanic eruption or sinkhole. " With this in mind, he observed the terrain of a large set with the satellite map of his mobile phone to prove this place. Sure enough, he found that Daji did have a large crater terrain, which provided an important basis for the appearance of meteorites.
Zhang Jianjun hopes that domestic authorities can authoritatively identify this meteorite discovered by Daji, which may rewrite the history of meteorites in the world.