[meteorite-list] Meteorite hunting in Spain vs. USA deserts

From: Martin Altmann <Altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Feb 22 12:52:56 2005
Message-ID: <001401c51907$ed1a0ca0$76349a54_at_9y6y40j>

Yep,

BUT: I just took a look in the Meteorite Magazine from last August.
There the pictures of the Franconia strewnfield shows that it's a desert.
Very poor vegetation.
Strange dark stones easy discernable in walking around. Very arid. Flat.
Vast. Empty.
Such landscapes we don't have in Europe (despite that Spanish desert?).
Everything is full with vegetation, agriculture, forests.
So that one has to go with a detector. And the wet climate! Take as example
the last Neuschwanstein stone, which was dicovered only one year after the
fall. He already showed rust. And finally the population density. Ask an
amateur astronomer, it's impossible to find a dark spot anymore. Europe is a
place, where you can't get lost anymore. Walk in any direction after half an
hour you'll find the next house. Only in Malta it's worse, I think.
So many areals are cultivated since hundreds of years, mountainous regions
are not suitable for hunting as there the erosive processes are working
especially fast, to hunt in a forest for stones is also not sensefull.
Industrialization had a longer history here. Don't know how much iron the
native Americans melted and whether they did intensive agriculture, but for
sure it wasn't such a crowded place like Europe through the last 3000 years.
Each week, somebody sends me a picture of slag, asking whether it's a
meteorite. One took the trouble to investigate further and found out that in
the region, he found it, there were furnaces in the 12.th century. And
humidity kills, here's raning almost every second or third day.
Even there were I'm always going to in Romania, the Bagaran, one area with
lowest population density and a former steppe until the fifties, you would
find artifacts from the Dacians, Romans, the Huns, the gold treasures from
the Goths rather than a meteorite!
The only chance to get one is to go there, where once a meteorite fell or
was found to look for more.
Wait I'll check the German meteorites....
Without the doubtfull ones, we have from 1647 on 32 falls, but only 14
finds.
>From these finds, 11 are irons or stony-iron
So we have a find rate of 1 stone per 100 years.
And from this 3 stones, 1 was found in a context, where it doesn't belong
to: in a peat bog.
The other two ones have the classical finding cause: Ploughed up.
(From the others, one iron was found in a furnace, already smelted; another
in a quarry,
and Steinbach was perhaps an observed fall.)

So if I planned to go on the hunt, I think any place else would be more
suitable (despite the oceans).
And look at the professional hunters, where are they going on this
continent? There where already some meteorites were found. So they bring us
Kainsaz, Vengerovo, Seymchan, Shirokovsky ouch!
Perhaps if we ask kindly Koutyrev will show as again photos, how they found
new Kainsazs and the Vengerovo stone?

Wow, in huge Canada only 14 stones were found, 2 of them on ice.......

Buckleboo!
Martin


----- Original Message -----
From: "JKGwilliam" <h3chondrite_at_cox.net>
To: "Martin Altmann" <Altmann_at_Meteorite-Martin.de>;
<meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Meteorite hunting in Spain vs. USA deserts


> Martin,
> Out here is the American West, we have similar problems with metallic
trash
> but it doesn't stop the meteorite hunters. Take the Franconia strewn
field
> for example. During a typical day of meteorite hunting, a person will find
> hundreds of metal targets from as small as boot tacks to large objects
like
> bomb casing left over from WWII bombing practice. The area was used to
> train bomber and fighter pilots and the ground is littered (on the surface
> and buried) with empty shell casings, 50 and 30 caliber projectiles and
the
> steel links that held the belts of ammo together. It isn't uncommon to
dig
> 50 - 100 pieces of trash for every meteorite fragment found, sometimes
more.
>
> These areas were also known gold producing area and the metal trash left
> behind by men trying to dig a living out of the desert is phenomenal. We
> find sardine cans, soup cans, grease cans, Price Albert tobacco cans (very
> popular) as well as broken tools, pipe and very thin nearly invisible
> wire. Then to top it all off, we have to deal with the tiny bits of
> metallic foil left behind from cigarette packs and chewing gum wrappers.
>
> The die-hard hunters have developed a simple philosophy " just dig it."
>
> Best,
>
> John Gwilliam
>
Received on Tue 22 Feb 2005 12:57:07 PM PST