Event Two - UCLA Meteorite Gallery

The second event that I attended was a little closer to home, for me at least, the UCLA Meteorite Gallery in the Geology Building.

Me at the Meteorite Gallery - Source Me

 For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s a fantastic, if intimate, exhibit space, filled with all kind of interesting specimens that are not from this world.

4.6 Billion Year old Meteorite - Source Me

I had the opportunity, at one point, to hold a meteorite, a rock really, that was utterly unremarkable to look at. I would have tossed it aside without a second thought had I come across it in the road, at least until I learned an astounding fact. That rock was 4.6 billion years old, meaning it was older than our planet. Think about that for a moment.

Rock ages are measured by the time since they last melted. Hawaii, as an island, is only about 30 million years old; meaning the dinosaurs never got a vacation on the islands (USGS).  The oldest surface rock that we can find is still only 3.5 billion years old (Tapani) meaning some of these meteors were very old even then. They go back to the very formation of the solar system.

Basalt Meteorite - Source UCLA

One of the other fantastic parts of the collection was a few Martian Meteorites.  These rocks were blasted off of the surface of Mars by impacts, and then slowly made their way to earth in the intervening millennium.

These kind of facts truly astound me, much like Carl Sagan’s view of the Pale Blue Dot. It says something truly amazing that we as a species were able to collect all of these disparate elements, rocks from different pieces of the solar system that made their way to us on Earth on their own, and put them in a single room on the UCLA Campus.  If that isn’t art, I don’t know what is.

"Hawaiian Volcanoes." Usgs.gov. USGS, n.d. Web. 08 June 2015.

"Meteorite Collection." UCLA Meteorite Gallery. UCLA, n.d. Web. 08 June 2015.

Tapani, Mutanen. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland, Vol. 75 (1–2) Pp. 51–68 The 3.5 Ga Siurua Trondhjemite Gneiss in the Archaean Pudas- Järvi Granulite Belt, Northern Finland (n.d.): n. pag. Http://www.geologinenseura.fi. Geological Society of Finland, 2003. Web.