Tagish Lake
Tagish Lake is a lake in Yukon and northern British Columbia, Canada. The lake is more than 100 km (62 mi) long and about 2 km wide.
It has two arms, the Taku Arm in the east which is very long and mostly in British Columbia and Windy Arm in the west, mostly in Yukon. The Klondike Highway runs along Windy Arm south of Carcross. Bennett Lake flows into Tagish Lake, so the northern portion of Tagish Lake was part of the route to the Klondike used by gold-seekers during the Klondike Gold Rush.
The meteorite
On January 18, 2000, a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite now known as "Tagish Lake", fell on the frozen surface of the Taku Arm. A number of fragments were recovered and studied by researchers from the University of Calgary, University of Western Ontario, and NASA; the meteorite currently resides in the University of Alberta meteorite collection.
The name
The lake is named for the Tagish people. Tagish means fish trap in the old Tagish language, an Athabascan language. Other sources translate Tagish as "it (spring ice) is breaking up" .
Tagish Lake (meteorite)
The Tagish Lake meteorite fell at 16:43 UTC on 18 January 2000 in the Tagish Lake area in northwestern British Columbia, Canada.
History
Fragments of the Tagish Lakemeteorite landed upon the Earth on January 18, 2000 at 16:43 UT (08:43 local time in Yukon) after a large meteoroid exploded in the upper atmosphere at altitudes of 50–30 kilometres (31–19 mi) with an estimated total energy release of about 1.7 kilotons. Following the reported sighting of a fireball in southern Yukon and northern British Columbia, Canada, more than 500 fragments of the meteorite were collected from the lake's frozen surface. Post-event atmospheric photographs of the trail left by the associated fireball and U.S. Department of Defense satellite information yielded the meteor trajectory. Most of the stony, carbonaceous fragments landed on the Taku Arm of the lake, coming to rest on the lake's frozen surface. The passage of the fireball and the high-altitude explosion set off a wide array of satellite sensors as well as seismographs.
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