Rock from outer space

Joe Couture
The Leader-Post

Friday, August 31, 2007

Nathan Seon, a third-year geology student at the University of Regina, holds a piece of a meteorite cut from the original, which was the size of a softball. It was found near Loreburn in 1999.

Nathan Seon's summer job could have been filmed as a reality show cross between an Indiana Jones flick and The X-Files.

He spent the last few months searching for rare treasures, and ended up unearthing something that could help unlock the secrets of the universe.

The University of Regina geology student was a field researcher for the Prairie Meteorite Search, scouring Western Canada for former heavenly bodies. And his quest paid off.

Seon and Dr. Martin Beech, one of three professors who leads the search, confirmed on Thursday they had indeed located one of the alien nuggets. That brings the number now recovered in Saskatchewan to 15 and the total in Canada to a mere 74.

The softball-sized meteorite hurled through Earth's atmosphere hundreds of years ago at speeds potentially reaching a kilometre per second. It found its resting place near Loreburn, where Saskatchewan's climate rusted and weathered it into the landscape until 1999. Then, a Regina man working on a construction site found it and took it home.

The discoverer wishes to remain anonymous, but he did admit to using the celestial chunk as a doorstop until a friend told him about Seon's Search.

Working at a lab at the University of Calgary, one of the partner institutions in the search, Seon confirmed the interplanetary lump is made of iron and nickel, guaranteeing its starry status.

Iron meteorites are extremely rare, with only 800 catalogued worldwide.

This one is a substantive piece, weighing in at 1.3 kilograms. Each gram is worth between $5 and $7, making it a very valuable hunk of metal.

But the scientific worth is a bigger draw for Seon and Beech. The meteorite was either part of a core of a broken asteroid, or produced by two asteroids slamming together, with heat and energy melting everything and forming iron.

"These are the first objects that would have formed in the solar system, 41/2 billion years ago, so they don't get any older than this," Beech said.

Further analysis will offer insight into how the planets were formed, he added.

While meteorite discoveries are relatively few and far between -- the search has catalogued 14 since its inception in 2000, upping the national inventory by 20 per cent -- meteorites actually fall from the sky all the time.

"Even the rate that we're finding them now is still pretty slow considering how many could potentially be on the ground," Seon said.

Some meteorites have actually fallen into cars and buildings in the past, and at the speed of a bullet, they can cause some significant damage.

"They fall anywhere, anytime," Seon said. "They're not discriminatory."

However, sometimes what's originally thought to be a meteorite really ends up being space junk off an old satellite or similar earthly object.

"That's technically another thing you can be hit by, I guess," Beech laughed. "It's a dangerous world sometimes."

Joking aside, it is tough to identify meteorites. The process involves extensive analysis, and researchers are careful before declaring one to be genuine.

Iron meteorites do have a characteristic appearance, while stone meteorites are easier to overlook. The researchers can get a pretty good sense of whether or not a stone has astronomical origins by looking at a picture, so anyone with an odd-looking rock is encouraged to e-mail photos to Martin.Beech@uregina.ca.

Beech, whose X-Files-esque personal reality show has had a Simpsons-scale run, says the excitement of discovery never burns up in the atmosphere.

"It still does give me a thrill when I think this is a piece of material from a part of the solar system way out beyond the orbit of Mars, and it's literally the oldest material you can possibly handle, older than the Earth itself," he said.

And while his time with the search has come to an end, Seon's adventure is just beginning, he said.

"I've always had this fascination with space and new discoveries," he said.

"It's just amazing to be able to track these down and get these into research institutions ... I've got the itch for it now."