The Day Iowa Instantly Ignited
by Sam Hooper Samuels

More than 70 million years ago, a 12-trillion ton meteorite struck near Manson. More explosive than all of history's nuclear weapons detonated together, it left an unimaginable trail of death.

I'm standing in a rock library, or "core shed" as the geologists call them, at the University of Iowa's Oakdale Research Park in Coralville with Ray Anderson of the Iowa Geological Survey.

A core shed looks less like a library than a hardware store. The aisles are constructed of rough wood in a warehouse-like ambience, with fork lifts and canvas bags of rocks here and there on the cement floor.

The shelves are stacked not with books, but with cardboard boxes full of rock samples, all marked with cryptic codes denoting where they were drilled and from what depth. Anderson, a geologist with a thick sandy-red beard, a mane of curly hair, and a special interest in meteorites, is trying to retrieve a box of longitudinally-sawed core samples of Phanerozoic clast breccia he extracted in Calhoun County near Manson a few years back, which he really wants me to see.

"Shoot, I was going to show you the M-1 cores," Anderson says as he looks at the unstable pile of lumber someone has decided to store in the aisle between us and the sought-after rock samples. "There's lots to see, if I can get to it." He clambers in, his large frame teetering on loose boards, and finds the box he wants. That's when I notice a small cylindrical yellow object hanging from his neck by a leather lanyard.

"That's my Kennecott copper magnet," Anderson says, showing me the flat metal tip. If you're a bank, you give customers a nice pen with your company's name on it, or perhaps a travel mug. If you're an international mining company like Kennecott Exploration, you give out magnets.

"Folks bring in what they think are meteorites all the time," he says. But most true meteorites contain lots of iron, while most ordinary stones do not. "This is to see if it's magnetic."

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