Event 3: UCLA Meteorite Collection

I had a class a while back in the Geology building on oceanography. The section met just across the hall from this small gallery tucked away at the far end of the building. Back then I never thought to visit the gallery because, well, it wasn't very interesting to me. I'm already reading about rocks in the base of our own planet; rocks from outer space weren't very appealing because of that.

Fast forward two and a half years and here I am in this gallery. To be honest I didn't expect the collection to be this large, both in number and size of the meteorites. Another shock was the absolute lack of security: that the meteorites are open to the public every weekday until 4 PM like this seems very, very risky.

Maybe that's a testament to the mass of these meteorites. Meteorites often contain a large amount of iron and other metals. Those meteorites on the ground display? Over 300 pounds. Good luck stealing those.

The smaller ones are also interesting. Meteorites are fragments of much larger rocks. Most of the main body is burnt up during entry into Earth's atmosphere, and what's left of it belongs in a museum like this. Often times these fragments can be tiny. I don't know how they distinguished some of these meteorites from regular rocks upon discovery.

But once the elemental composition is analyzed, it's a lot easier to determine whether a rock originated from Earth or from somewhere else. Simply put, if it has anything that's not found in Earth, it's not from Earth. The molecular structure of the rocks are also a determining factor in determining and classifying meteorites.

I don't know, maybe I'm having a muted response to the meteorites because it's such an old topic for me. I'm used to considering time in the scale of eons. In some ways it brings out the fatalist in me, that these rocks from billions of years ago will return to dust indistinguishable from that of the Earth. I wonder what significance mere meteorites will hold if humanity does someday move off the Earth and onto other habitats.