[meteorite-list] On The Hunt For Kansas Meteorites

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Dec 16 11:37:33 2005
Message-ID: <200512161624.jBGGOng20383_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/nation/13422308.htm

On the hunt for Kansas meteorites
BY KEVIN MURPHY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
December 16, 2005

GREENSBURG, Kan. - 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 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.

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.

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 Fri 16 Dec 2005 11:24:48 AM PST