[meteorite-list] Oman trip story

From: star-bits_at_comcast.net <star-bits_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Mar 21 13:24:56 2005
Message-ID: <031420050141.27479.4234EBBF0002BFE300006B5722007456729C9B070DD39D0E9B9C_at_comcast.net>

     Everybody seems to enjoy meteorite hunting tales so here is one from my just completed trip to Oman with Mike Farmer and Jim Strope. It was a good trip for me. I found a HUGE piece of Mike's lunar, a whopping 3.1 grams. OK, OK, maybe not huge, and not too pretty with none of the white clasts showing in Mike's either, but I found it and it is all mine ;-)). Not for sale until I'm dead and the kids break up my collection.

     The trip was formed after the confirmation that the stone Mike found in January was a lunar meteorite. Plans were made to leave on 23 Feb and several long unbearable flights later I met Jim and Mike in Dubai. Two days of driving later we arrived in the search area with a few hours of daylight left. We headed out into the desert putting the sun to our backs for the best viewing. Like the first trip to Oman with Jim and Mike, I was fortunate to find the first meteorite of the trip which also turned out to be the largest of the trip. In this case 6.55 kg of, unfortunately, several hundred very weathered fragments of OC.

     The next morning it was off to the lunar site. At 9:50 about half hour after arriving at the site I found my lunar piece within 100 feet of where Mike found his piece in January. I'd like to say I started jumping up and down screaming I found one, but the reality was quite different. By that time I had picked up and discarded 50-100 other small stones. This one didn't have the white clasts I had seen on Mike's. It certainly wasn't obvious enough that I left it in place to photograph first. It was different enough though that I put down my gps to mark the spot and took it over to Mike for his opinion. Definitely LUNAR!! BIG smiles, high fives and one very happy meteorite hunter, we took it back to the find site and photographed it, recorded the find data and continued the search. By 12:00 it was brutally hot in the sun and the last couple hours had produced nothing except sunburns and I found a couple artifacts. One was a 9x7cm very crude hand scraper and the other a small 2.5cm broken
 spear point. Made me wonder which came first the humans or the meteorite. I found another very nice scraper driving through a different area a few days later. A google search when I returned home indicated they could be as old as 30k-50k years. To get out of the sun we climbed into air-conditioned vehicles and headed east away from the highway.

     The rest of the day was the Mike Farmer show. The only meteorite I found all day was my lunar, Jim didn't find any, and Mike ended the day with 9. We wound up camping about 30-40 miles off the highway.

     The next day we planed the route to end the day and camp at the lunar site. Again I found 1 meteorite this day. One of the freshest meteorites from any of Mike's Oman trips and at 1212.5 grams a nice find. Driving from 7am to 7pm though and finding only one meteorite sure is boring and hard on ones butt. Three days and 3 meteorites and they were all nice ones.

     When we arrived back at the lunar site Mike found 2 more small lunar pieces, 2.04 and 0.78 grams within about 10 minutes. Mike has eyes like an eagle. They were the last two pieces we found. As we fixed dinner the wind really kicked up and there were thunderstorms off in the distance. Mike slept in a tent, Jim in one of the vehicles, and I just set up a cot and slept under the stars. They were giving me a hard time about getting rained on, but with an average annual rainfall of 0.0 inches in the central desert of Oman in Feb (and every other month as well) I wasn't worried. At 4am I woke up and rolled over. Through my eyelids I saw flashes. I put my glasses on and watched a great lighting show off in the distance for a while. Rolled over and headed back to sleep, but at 4:30 came a rumble of thunder. Since I was on a metal-legged cot I decided I might be better off in the vehicle. Put my pants on grabbed my sleeping bag, pillow, and shoes and headed to the vehicle. Halfway to the vehic
le there was huge bolt of lighting, one thousand-one, one thousand-two, one thousand-three, one thousand-four, one thousand RUMMMMBBBBLE. Less than a mile away, the vehicle was a great decision. Then the wind really started blowing and the rain started coming in buckets. Mike climbed in the other vehicle a minute or two after I did. Turning on the headlights we watched Mike's tent blow across the desert. Mike had to chase it in his vehicle and block it after a 100 meter flight. His metal case with his passport and other things ripped through the tent door while it was rolling and was dumped half-open in the mud. We drove the other vehicle over to the case and Jim grabbed it. Mike had been cataloging some of his meteorites and they were in the tent in small canvas bags, including the 2 small lunars. Losing them was a real concern until Mike found them just inside the tent door. One or two more rolls of the tent and they would have been out and lost to the wind. For the next 90 minutes or so we
 had 50-60 mile per hour winds and lots of rain. The spot we were at was pooling up. At this point we were glad we weren’t 30-40 miles from the highway like the previous night.

     The rains continued on and off until about 10am. Walking around you sank 3-4 inches in spots. We had hoped the rain would wash up some more lunar pieces, but that didn't happen. We did find Mike's duffel bag, which blew out of his tent, about 500 meters away. The fly-leaf over the tent we never found. After squishing around for a couple hours we decided to head back to the hotel and clean up.

    The trip back to the highway was exciting plowing through new ponds and muddy areas. We left tracks that will last for generations. We only got stuck once on the way back though, when Mike hit a spot where the mud was about 15 inches deep. It took a while to dig the soup from in front of the tires, but Mike zipped out with no problems. This was the only day we didn't find any meteorites. Turns out this was the biggest rain storm in Oman in 15 years.

     We decided to let the lunar field dry out for a couple days and headed farther north were it was a bit dryer. On our best day we found 15 meteorites. On 4 March at 16:47 I found our 40th meteorite, a 41.6 gram achondrite, which looks to be a diogenite. To be honest I was more thrilled about this than the lunar, because it was a cold find, not plowing someone else's find field. Several hours of searching the area however failed to turn up another piece. After the rain we returned to the lunar field a couple more times to search, including using a rake and shovel to stir things up, but didn't find any new pieces.

     All total for the trip I found 18 meteorites including the lunar and diogenite. My 16 ordinary chondrites weighed in at 12.9 kg. The 3 artifacts were a bonus, the first I have ever found. Never even found an arrowhead in Arizona before. For me it was a great trip and I'll be ready to head back as soon as the agony of the long flights and days and days of driving fade away, and the kids get tired of seeing their old man around the house.

You can see photos of my lunar and the achondrite at the following URL

<http://www.star-bits.com/oman.htm>

--
Eric Olson
ELKK Meteorites
http://www.star-bits.com

Received on Sun 13 Mar 2005 08:41:19 PM PST