Roughly eight months after a 17 meter, 10,000 ton meteorite fell over Russa's Ural mountains injuring over 1,000 people, divers have retrieved a big portion from Russia's Lake Chebarkul BBC News reported.
"Fusion crust forms as the meteoroid is travelling through the atmosphere as a fireball," Dr. Caroline Smith, curator of meteorits at London's Natural History Museum told BBC News. "The outer surface gets so hot it melts the rock to form a dark, glassy surface crust which we term a fusion crust. Regmaglypts are the indentations that look a bit like thumbprints, also seen on the surface of the meteorite."
After covering the novelty, putting it on a metal sheet, and taking it out of the water by using ropes, divers split the rock into three parts. The novelty was then put on a scale to find out its weight, which was 570 kilograms or 1.255 pound therefore breaking the scale.
While searching, the divers were delayed because they also discovered the rock actually measured out to be 13 meters, and not six or eight meters as originally thought.
"The preliminary examination... shows that this is really a fraction of the Chelyabinsk meteorite," Sergey Zamozdra, an associate professor at Chelyabinsk State University told the Interfax News Agency. "This chunk is most probably one of the top 10 biggest meteorite fragments ever found."
Since the February incident, divers have removed over 12 other pieces from the lake, but only four or five have actually been the real thing BBC News reported.
"The rock had a fracture when we found it," one unnamed scientist said during the live video feed Fox News reported. "As the scientists pulled it from the lake, using levers and ropes, the fracture expanded, splitting it into at least three pieces. It weighed [1,255-pounds] before the pieces fell off. And then the scale broke."
