[meteorite-list] Meteorite Collecting Ban

From: Jeff Grossman <jgrossman_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:16:31 2004
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030808074239.02f7b1a8_at_gsvaresm02.er.usgs.gov>

Without taking sides in this debate, I can help get the statistics straight.

73% of classified and published meteorites are Antarctic (source Metbase
v6.0, total 20,366 of 27,732 meteorites ).

Of the remaining meteorites, ~56% (~4100) of them are in numbered series
directly attributable to commercial collection. Perhaps 100-200 others
without numbered names were recently collected in this fashion. I was not
able to get a handle on the number of meteorites attributable to Nininger's
efforts, but it is probably several hundred. Allowing 400 for the latter
two cases, we find that ~17% of all published meteorites have been
systematically collected for profit.

Of course, you have to augment these numbers for unclassified/undescribed
meteorites. I don't know how many Saharan meteorites go undescribed, but
there are more than 1000 with provisional names. Assuming these are all
meteorites, and using 1200 as the number we can bump the totals up to:

70% of all known meteorites are Antarctic
20% of all known meteorites have been collected commercially.
The remaining 10% include all the falls and sporadic finds throughout history.

jeff



At 03:52 AM 8/8/2003, mark ford wrote:




>Re: collecting Ban.
>
>These scientists/time wasters that support a collecting ban would do
>well to sit down and think about their actions...
>
>Firstly >90% of all meteorites are found by 'collectors/hunters' (or
>dealers to collectors). Do these scientists really want to loose these
>thousands and thousands of meteorites every year? Who would find them if
>they banned collecting? - they would just lie in the ground rusting
>away, or get built on by an ever expanding world.
>
>So that would leave the odd 4 man scientific party every year to the
>Antarctic? Yeah right get real, do they really believe that if the
>supply of meteorites 'dried up' the government would keep funding labs
>and research programs? No they would cut back funds!
>
>In any case as far as I know every meteorite that has been classified
>has had a sample donated to science.
>
>FACT : Science gets more meteorites due to collecting than it ever would
>without it! So my message to those that want it banned - do something
>useful with your time!
>
>What they should be doing is encouraging people to get stuff classified
>and invest in more labs so that the classification is easier and happens
>quicker!
>
>However - It is a shame that many many meteorites never get classified,
>one has to wonder what undiscovered revelations are sitting in our
>collections having never been seen by anyone 'in Authority', but hey
>that's life!
>
>
>Just My 2 quids worth!
>
>
>Mark Ford
>
>
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Dr. Jeffrey N. Grossman
Chair, Meteorite Nomenclature Committee (Meteoritical Society)
US Geological Survey
954 National Center
Reston, VA 20192, USA
Phone: (703) 648-6184 fax: (703) 648-6383
Received on Fri 08 Aug 2003 08:46:44 AM PDT