[meteorite-list] Oman trip story

From: Gerald Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Mar 21 13:24:56 2005
Message-ID: <00ef01c52897$b6008fb0$6401a8c0_at_Dell>

Eric,
Thanks for sharing the details of your adventures in Oman.
Congradulations on your finds!
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: <star-bits_at_comcast.net>
To: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 8:41 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Oman trip story


> 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 a
> nd 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 th
> e vehicle. Halfway to the vehicle 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 ha
> ve 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
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Received on Mon 14 Mar 2005 08:14:09 AM PST