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October 13, 2000

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Tagish Lake Meteorite

By Kate Wong

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Image: copyright of UWO and the University of Calgary

Last January a meteorite hurtled into Earth's atmosphere in a fiery streak, landing on the fozen surface of Tagish Lake in Canada. New research reported today in the journal Science suggests that this ancient rock may be the most primitive solar system material yet studied.

According to the report, the Tagish Lake meteorite appears to have originated in the middle of the asteroid belt as part of a meteoroid that, in its pre-atmospheric state, had a mass of about 200,000 kilograms. It belongs to a rare class of meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites, which comprise only around 2 percent of all meteorites. Furthermore, analyses of its mineral composition and carbon and oxygen isotopes indicate that Tagish Lake represents an entirely new type of carbonaceous chondrite, the most primitive known. As such it should contain the clearest record of the solar system's most ancient events. "The more pristine meteoritic material of this type we can analyze, the better we will understand how our solar system formed and how the remnants of others came to be incorporated into it," Jeffrey N. Grossman of the U.S. Geological Survey writes in a commentary accompanying the report. "It seems likely that the Tagish Lake meteorite will be the most important recovered fall since the Allende (Mexico) and Murchison (Australia) events, both in 1969, touched off a revolution in our understanding of meteorites and what they tell us about the early solar system."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and was formerly senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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