The meteorite that survived the great floods and human madness

The rock with possibly the most fascinating history on Earth has an ancient name: Tomanowos. It means “the visitor from heaven” in the extinct language of the Clackamas Indian tribe of Oregon.

The Clackamas revered the Tomanowos, also known as Willamette meteorites, believing that they came to unite heaven, earth, and water for their people.

Rare alien rocks like Tomanowos have a kind of fatal attraction for us humans. When American Europeans found the 15-ton pockmarked rock near the Willamette River more than a century ago, Tomanowos suffered violent uprooting, a series of lawsuits, and a period under armed guard. It is one of the strangest rock stories I have come across in my years as a geoscientist. But let me start the story from its actual beginning, billions of years ago.

History of a rock

Tomanowos is a 15-ton meteorite made, like most metallic meteorites, of iron with about 8% nickel mixed. These iron and nickel atoms formed in the nucleus of large stars that ended their lives in supernova explosions.

Those massive explosions peppered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion, crude elements that later ended up in a nebula or cloud of dust and gas.

Finally, the elements were brought together by gravity, forming the first planetary orb or protoplanets in our solar system.

About 4.5 billion years ago, Tomanowos was part of the nucleus of one of these protoplanets, where heavier metals such as iron and nickel accumulate.

Sometime after that, this protoplanet must have collided with another planetary body, sending this meteorite and an unknown number of other chunks back into space.

Riding the flood

Subsequent impacts over billions of years eventually pushed Tomanowos’s orbit through Earth. As a result of this cosmic billiards game, the Tomanowos meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere about 17,000 years ago and landed on an ice cap in Canada.

Over the following decades, slowly flowing ice transported Tomanowos south, toward a glacier on the Montana Fork River in what is now the United States. This glacier had created a 2,000-foot-high ice dam across the river, flooding the massive Lake Missoula upstream.

The ice dam collapsed as Tomanowos was approaching, releasing one of the largest floods ever documented: the Missoula floods, which shaped the Scablands of Washington state with the power of several thousand Niagara Falls.

Caught in the ice and washed downstream by the flood, Tomanowos crossed modern Idaho, Washington and Oregon along the swollen Columbia River at speeds sometimes faster than 40 miles per hour, according to simulations by modern geologists. As it floated near what is now the city of Portland, the meteorite’s ice cap broke and Tomanowos sank to the bottom of the river.

It is one of hundreds of other “erratic” rocks, rocks made of elements that do not match local geology, that have been found along the Columbia River. They are all reminiscences of the catastrophic floods of Missoula, but none is as rare as Tomanowos.

A rock worth suing for

When the flood waters receded, Tomanowos was exposed to the elements. For thousands of years, rain mixed with iron sulfide in the meteorite. This produced sulfuric acid that gradually dissolved the exposed side of the rock, creating the crater-filled surface it has today.

Several thousand years after the Missoula floods, the Clackamas arrived in Oregon and discovered the meteorite. Did you know it came from the heavens, despite the lack of a crater? The name Tomanowos, or Visitor from the Sky, suggests that the rock’s extraterrestrial origins may have been suspected.

Millennia of peaceful rest in the Willamette Valley ended in 1902 when an Oregon man named Ellis Hughes secretly moved the iron rock to his own land and claimed it as his property.

Transporting a 15-ton rock in a wooden cart for nearly a mile without being noticed was not easy, even in the Wild West. Hughes and his son worked for three heartbreaking months. Once the meteorite was on his land, he began charging for admission to see the “Willamette meteorite.”

In fact, however, the legitimate owner of the iron rock turned out to be the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, which owned the land where Hughes had found the meteorite and demanded its return. As the lawsuit progressed through the courts, the company hired a guard who sat atop Tomanowos 24 hours a day with a loaded gun. They won the case in 1905 and sold Tomanowos to the American Museum of Natural History in New York a year later.

Floods

Today Tomanowos can be seen in the exhibition of the Hall of the Universe museum, which still refers to it as the Willamette meteorite. In 2000, the museum signed an agreement with descendants of the Clackamas tribe, recognizing the spiritual importance of the meteorite to Oregon natives.

The Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde make an annual ceremonial visit to the ancient rock that, as their ancestors so aptly observed, brought heaven and water together here on Earth. In 2019, several fragments of the meteorite that had been kept separately were returned to the tribe.

But the museum’s written exhibit only tells part of the rock’s long history. Skip the Missoula floods, despite the importance of this event for modern earth science.

Decades after geologists J. Harlen Bretz and Joseph T. Pardee separately postulated Missoula flood theory in the early 1900s, their research was used to explain how Tomanowos arrived in Oregon, where he was found. His work also triggered one of the most significant paradigm shifts in recent geoscience: the recognition that catastrophic floods contribute significantly to erosion and landscape evolution.

Previously, scientists had followed Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which held that the Earth’s landscape was sculpted by regular natural processes evenly distributed over long periods. Normal floods fit this theory, but the notion of rapid and catastrophic events like the Missoula floods was somewhat heretical.

The idea of ​​the Great Ice Age Floods helped geologists a century ago to prevail over pre-scientific and religious explanations of unusual finds, such as how marine fossils could be found at high altitudes and how a metallic rock giant from outer space stopped in Oregon.

---

---

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.