IT came from outer space. And, this week, it is going on display at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh.
“It” is actually a four-piece rock ensemble, so to say: parts of a meteor that fell to Earth nearly a hundred years ago between Coupar Angus and Blairgowrie, in Perthshire.
The Strathmore Meteorite, as it it is known, entered Earth’s atmosphere east of Dunbar, East Lothian, streaked in a fiery mass over Fife then broke up in mid-air, scattering fragments hither and yon. Three landed in fields while one went through the roof a cottage.
On that cold, clear afternoon of December 3, 1917, the meteorite was seen by awe-struck Earthlings from Northumberland to Aberdeenshire. It had come a long way, from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was getting on a bit: about 4.5 billion years old, dating back to the birth of the solar system.
Meteorites are fragments of asteroids. Most burn up when they hit Earth’s atmosphere and, though hundreds of meteorites do fall on Earth, most land in the ocean which, you will know if you’ve been watching Blue Planet II, covers 70 per cent of the surface of the globe.
Scotland has gotten off fairly lightly with meteorites. Only four have made the news, so to speak, going back to 1804, though many more are undoubtedly unrecorded, plummeting unobserved in our deepest, darkest places.
The meteor in 1804 landed in a quarry near High Possil, Glasgow. There’s a fabulous account of it from the Herald and Advertiser (fine old rag!) of April 30, which begins: “We have been favoured with the following circumstantial account of a Phenomenon in the neighbourhood which is at present the subject of much conversation and Philosophical Enquiry.”
Oh, I cannot tell you much I wish we wrote like that today, instead of being all snappy and coming to the point. Imagine getting to cap up “Phenomenon”: bliss.
But I digress. The report says that three men at work in a field “were alarmed with a singular noise”, which turned out to be quite plural, consisting of “the firing of a cannon … the sound of a bell, or rather of a gong, with a violently whizzing noise”.
Violently whizzing, eh? Sounds serious. In a nearby quarry, an overseer told one of his colleagues who was up a tree: “Come down, I think there is some judgment on us.”
The High Possil Meteorite is in Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum, and a discreet stone near Possil Loch commemorates its fall.
As for the Strathmore Meteorite, it’s fair to say the National Museum’s exhibition won’t be as big and flashy as many have been of late, and it’s probably not something you’d travel a hundred miles to see. But the place is always worth a day out.
Apart from which, somewhere in its collection, the museum also has a fragment of the 12,000-tonne Chelyabinsk meteorite, which caused a sensation in 2013 when it landed 40km south of the city of that name, injuring 1,500 people and shattering 3,600 windows.
Now that’s what I call a Phenomenon.
Down to Earth, celebrating the centenary of the Strathmore Meteorite, runs from Friday until April 1, 2018, at the Grand Gallery, Level 1, National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh.
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