[meteorite-list] "On the Hunt for Kansas Meteorites"
From: Notkin <geoking_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun Dec 11 12:26:15 2005 Message-ID: <6c83b79efb99ee5b11485f8418ea7be8_at_notkin.net> Dear Listees: Good morning all. Very good article (with photo) about Steve's Brenham adventures in today's "Wichita Eagle." You may even recognize some of the characters mentioned in the story. I count five Meteorite List members quoted in the one piece. Regards, Geoff N. ******************** http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/13379891.htm On the hunt for Kansas meteorites Wichita native and meteorite hunter Steve Arnold, who dug up a 1,400-pound specimen near Greensburg, is turning his finds into cash. BY KEVIN MURPHY Kansas City Star GREENSBURG - Bouncing over the dirt rows of the newly planted wheat field, Steve Arnold's contraption of plastic pipes mounted on six lawnmower wheels looks mighty strange. And then there is Arnold--pulling the rig behind him while a plastic bucket containing a metal detector hangs around his neck. Odd as he looks out there in the field, Arnold has brought a new and lucrative form of farming to south-central Kansas: He harvests meteorites. "A cash crop," Arnold says, beaming. It certainly can be. Last month, Arnold announced that he had dug up near Greensburg a 1,400-pound pallasite meteorite, the largest of its type ever found in the United States. It could be worth at least $1 million, possibly up to $3 million, experts said. The owner of the land where Arnold found his prize will get a nice cut of the sale price. Arnold has signed leases with the owners of some 3,000 acres to look for meteorites. He pays them up front for hunting rights, and they get a share of his sales. "I've never heard of anyone doing that before," said Jeffrey Grossman, a geochemist and secretary of the Meteoritical Society, an international planetary science organization. Arnold's partner and lawyer, Phil Mani of San Antonio, Texas, set up the recent contracts and paid expenses for Arnold's prospecting in Kansas. Mani said the contracts are a first and are necessary because meteorites are otherwise the property of owners of the land where they fall. "We are going to cover all the land where we think meteorites can be found," Mani said. Arnold, a Wichita native, makes his living trading and selling meteorites, which are sought after by museums and universities and by collectors tantalized by the other-world nature of such rocks. Meteorites come from the asteroid belt formed at the dawn of the solar system about 4.3 billion years ago. "It's from out there on the other side of Mars. How cool is that?" Arnold said. "You can own something that has not changed since the beginning of the solar system." Meteorites, most smaller than grapefruits, are sold over the Internet and at shows. Arnold's is being kept in Texas and will be displayed at a major gem and mineral show in Tucson next month. News of his discovery spread fast, landing Arnold on several national news shows and stirring envy in the meteorite community. "Its overwhelming size and shape make it truly unique," said Allan Lang, a well-known meteorite dealer in upstate New York. Meanwhile, Arnold is back in the field looking for more. His high-powered metal detector can pick up signals 20 feet below ground, he said. "There may be something bigger, but I doubt there is something better," Arnold said. Arnold's meteorite is dark orange to bronze in color, measures about 36 by 30 inches and has a rare bullet-like shape and smooth surface. Pallasite meteorites such as Arnold's are made of iron nickel and olivine crystals and account for less than 1 percent of all discovered meteorites, which are rare in the first place. A bounty of meteorites Kansas is a leading source of meteorite discoveries in the United States, authorities say. The state is extensively farmed, and it has relatively little foliage and few indigenous rocks that people may confuse with meteorites, said Geoffrey Notkin, an Arizona meteorite hunter who has sometimes helped Arnold search in Kansas. Another reason is that 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, the Greensburg area was pelted with meteorites from what later was named the Brenham meteorite, after the township where some pieces landed. Prehistoric Indians gathered the fragments as religious symbols, and the first documented collections occurred in the 1880s. In the 1920s, famed meteorite collector Harvey Nininger found a crater from one point of impact, and he encouraged residents to look for meteorites. The Brenham meteorites are in collections worldwide, including at Harvard and Yale universities, the Smithsonian Institution and in an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The previous largest meteorite was found in 1949 and is on display at a Greensburg museum that also is home to the world's largest hand-dug well. Greensburg is a town of 1,500, about 110 miles west of Wichita. Meteorite hunting has tapered off in the Greensburg area in recent decades as people assumed fields had been tapped out. But Arnold did some research that showed otherwise, though he declined to be specific. "There's an element of a good old-fashioned treasure hunt to it, complete with a treasure map," said Arnold, who lives in northern Arkansas but bought a house in Greensburg to serve as a search base. Arnold's German-made metal detector can find metal much deeper than most detectors. The coil of the detector is mounted on the flat trailer-like rig that he pulls behind an all-terrain vehicle. A cable connects the coil to the detector control box in the bucket around his neck. When the detector squeals, signaling a find, he slowly pulls the rig by hand to pinpoint the location. While he has found a few meteorites, he also has collected a tub of rusted metal items from bygone days of farming -- a buckle from a horse-drawn plow, horseshoes, a ring from a bull's nose, steel wagon wheels. Most items are near the surface, but the big meteorite was much deeper. Arnold dug down 2 feet by hand and then got a backhoe. Seven feet below, he unearthed the meteorite of a lifetime. A unique specimen The significance of Arnold's meteorite lies in its size and shape because many specimens have been studied from the same meteor breakup, authorities said. "Unless this one has some very unusual internal structure, it probably will not advance the science significantly," said Randy Van Schmus, geology professor and meteorite expert at the University of Kansas. "As a collector's item, it would have extremely high value. It's a very significant find and a very good museum specimen." Denton Ebel, assistant curator of earth and planetary sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, said the meteorite would probably bring at least $1 million. Small pieces of pallasite meteorites from Kansas have sold for about $4 to $5 a gram, collector Lang said, which would make Arnold's meteorite worth from $2.5 million to more than $3 million if cut up and every piece got sold. Mani and Arnold believe, however, that the meteorite may be valuable in one piece because of its size and shape. They would like to see it on museum display. "That's my hope and everything is negotiable," Arnold said. "If someone is willing to offer significantly more than someone else, it is theirs and they can do what they want with it." Arnold's discovery of the bigger meteorite cuts both ways for tourist-conscious Greensburg. On the one hand, Greensburg no longer can claim to have the biggest pallasite meteorite. But publicity over the new meteorite is a chance for Greensburg to plug its own meteorite--still a unique piece, museum manager Richard Stephenson said. "It's in our brochure, but we don't even have a T-shirt with a meteorite on it," Stephenson said. Museum employee Helen Schrader said the museum may not have to worry about being outdone by Arnold's find. "If they cut that one up to sell it," she mused, "we would still have the largest." Received on Sun 11 Dec 2005 12:26:11 PM PST |
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