The Brenham strewn field
A prehistoric pallasite shower on Kansas farmland, with one of the smallest impact craters known.
Key facts
- Fell
- prehistoric; first recognised in the 1880s
- Where
- near Haviland, Kiowa County, Kansas
- Recovered
- several tonnes
- Field
- farmland around the small Haviland crater
- Type
- Pallasite
The fall
Long before settlement, a stony-iron meteoroid broke apart over what is now Kansas. Farmers kept ploughing up heavy dark rocks in the 1880s, and the farmer Eliza Kimberly persuaded a professor to confirm they were meteorites.
The ellipse
Masses are scattered over the farmland around Haviland. In the 1930s the meteorite hunter Harvey Nininger showed that a shallow hollow there was a small impact crater, about 15 metres across, surrounded by fragments.
Where the big and small pieces landed
Pieces range from small fragments to masses of hundreds of kilograms. In 2005 hunters with a large metal detector found a 650-kilogram oriented mass buried in a field, its front shaped into a rounded cone during flight.
The law
The field is private farmland. In the United States a meteorite belongs to the landowner, and every Brenham search needs the owner's agreement.
Related pages
Glossary: Strewn field, Strewn field map, Fusion crust, Meteorite ownership