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Origin of fossil meteorites from Ordovician limestone in Sweden

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Abstract

Based on the analysis of data in [1, 2] on the concentrations of noble gases and the cosmic ray exposure age (CREA) of chromite grains in fossil meteorites, it was demonstrated in [3] that the distributions of gas concentrations and cosmic ray exposure ages can be explained under the assumption of the fall of a single meteorite in the form of a meteorite shower in southern Sweden less than 0.2 Ma after the catastrophic destruction of the parental body (asteroid) of L chondrites in space at approximately 470 Ma. This assumption differs from the conclusion in [1, 2, 4] about the long-lasting (for 1–2 Ma) delivery of L chondrites to the Earth, with the intensity of the flux of this material one to two orders of magnitude greater than now. The analysis of newly obtained data on samples from the Brunflo fossil meteorite [5] corroborates the hypothesis of a meteorite shower produced by the fall of a single meteorite. The possible reason for the detected correlations between the cosmic ray exposure ages of meteorites and the masses of the samples with the 20Ne concentrations can be the occurrence of Ne of anomalous isotopic composition in the meteorites.

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  1. Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Kosygina 19, Moscow, 119991, Russia

    V. A. Alexeev

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Original Russian Text © V.A. Alexeev, 2012, published in Geokhimiya, 2012, Vol. 50, No. 8, pp. 726–733.

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Alexeev, V.A. Origin of fossil meteorites from Ordovician limestone in Sweden. Geochem. Int. 50, 649–656 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016702912080022

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