[meteorite-list] Pairing discussion/questions

From: Jason Utas <meteoritekid_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:43:07 -0800
Message-ID: <93aaac891001182343w3ef16f75m62da0b298afef36a_at_mail.gmail.com>

Martin,
Sometimes I just can't believe the ways you'll skew things to justify
dealers' actions.

> Tell me examples for misrepresented coordinates from Oman!

I've just had some off-list conversations with *several* prominent
list-members, all of whom agreed that while not all Omani coordinates
are false (and most are probably real), some teams are supplying false
data.
That is generally accepted fact.

> Man, from the beginning on the Russians and the Germans in Oman meticulously
> documented their finds. With coordinates, with in situ photos, with
> describing the properties of the surrounding ground.. some of them were
> examined and trained geologists from one of the most reputable meteorite
> institutes of the World.

Yeah, they did good work, which isn't to say that everyone is doing
the same thing today.

> Yah I remember, in the very early times, they didn't made public the
> coordinates of their planetaries. But only for a very short period.
> And in consequence hunters from many countries, including the only official
> team there, found so many more stones of their early finds, in the
> strewnfields they had recovered and disclosed to everyone.

Right. They did that. People don't nowadays. If you haven't learned
that from chatting with dealers, I don't know what to tell you. You
should probably get out more.

> Make your homework, check the Dhofar and SaU numbers, the lunars and the
> Martians, who all found some and when.

Yeah, I know. Many of them are correct. Some aren't. You seem to
think that I'm saying that every Oman coordinate is a lie, and, to be
frank, I know that's far from the truth, and have said as much to
others in private emails.

> I don't allow you to discredit the incredibly important work, these true
> pioneers did for me, for science, for you and for all of us.

What they did is great, but there are a number of dealers going there
now who in some cases lie or withhold coordinates, especially for rare
finds.
I know this is true; it's a fact. Ask around.

> The only case I remember is the new Dhofar-Moon - there the finders seem to
> be simply afraid to give more information, because of the Suisse-Omani
> terror of the recent years.

Maaaybe. But Oman's hardly giong to send police over to reclaim rocks
(as though the US would allow such a thing), and the coordinates that
I've seen that are known to be incorrect still place the finds within
the country.
So, no.

> What is a meteorite worth, for science, when it has no find data.
>
> Go and ask, what USA, what China, what Japan is spending all in all
> including costs for infrastructure and personnel to find meteorites in
> Antarctica. We are speaking of hundreds of millions of dollars.
> For meteorites, all having lost their fall data, because they were
> transported by ice movement.
> Seems, that they do have a certain value.

Yes, but for different reasons. Those finds tell us much more for a
number of reasons - namely that they've been kept in a fairly arid
environment, and have generally suffered little organic contamination.

And you have to see the real flaw in your argument - you're saying
that meteorites are important scientifically regardless of where they
fall. I agree with that.

But you're merely downplaying the importance of information such as
where they were found, etc, without even justifying it.
Just because they're important for what they contain doesn't mean that
their fall location and distribution isn't important as well -
especially for finding more of the rare stones, even *if,* as you seem
to suggest, the place where a meteorite falls is irrelevant.

> Every Moroccan a GPS...
> Make again your homework. How many tons were found in total in Oman, in how
> many man-hours? 6 tons in 10 years, naturally most of them weathered
> ordinary chondrites (where you would pull a face, if you should pay even
> only 200$ a kilo, classified, well understood).

I'm not even sure at what you're getting at here. You seem to be
saying that find locations are irrelevant, it's common material, it
sells for too little money, and thus taking coordinates wouldn't be
worth it.

I disagree.

We have a hell of a lot of those apparently revolting meteorites boxed
away, waiting for a day when a lab might be more interested in working
on them. But you're getting sidetracked. This has nothing to do with
whether or not finds should be GPS'ed, etc. All you've told me is
that a one kilogram stone could buy a decent GPS unit.

> Make your homework. How many different meteorites do we have from Antarctica
> after a third of a century hunting and spending billions of USD?
> 7000.
> And - naturally - most of them ordinary chondrites.

Your point?

> Alone with NWA we are in less than 9 years at number 6000.

So what you're saying is that it would take three times as long for
the meteorites to be recovered with adequate find data.
Ok, so:
1) It's possible.
2) Is there any reason not to take the time to do it right? This
would allow for the recording of thousands of strewnfields, which are
instead lost forever.

> And, do your homework, what do you find in the Bulletins?
> Incredibly disproportionately highly more scientifically interesting stuff
> than weathered OCs.
> The bulk in Sahara are like everywhere else on Earth the weathered OCs.
> Those aren't classified, because no scientist wants to work on such material
> and no institute nor collector wants to have them.

Well, there are two more flaws in your reasoning here. Firstly, while
they may not be as interesting scientifically, strewnfield data could
still be gathered - if anything, I think this makes your point even
less valid. What they lack in pertinent chemical and structural data
doesn't change the fact that we could get additional information about
meteorite fall rates, and the density of finds in arid environments,
never mind actually understanding the pairing, which, with ordinary
chondrites, is now information that is simply lost forever.

Oh, and if no one wanted them, they'd be free. Good luck finding them
for under ~$100/kg, even for the "ugliest" stones.

> In the Bulletins you see from Sahara only the tip of the iceberg, the best
> of the best.

First-off, that's just not true. The majority of NWA's are still
ordinary chondrites. Yes there's a far disproportional number of
rarer meteorites, but OC's are still prevalent.

And again, this is irrelevant. Great, there are many rare meteorites.
 You're still losing practically all of the find data for each stone.
Maybe there's 100kg more of NWA 2737 out there, but we'll never know
because that information is now lost and the nomads who found it
weren't told it was a meteorite until years later.

> The people of Maghreb have to pick up just as well as any other hunters
> elsewhere too their hundred true meteorites until they hold a for you boring
> eucrite in their hand.

And I've found over a hundred meteorites here in California and have
documented every single chondrite meticulously - and we've turned up a
few achondrites in the mix.
Thanks to the way we do things, we might be able to find more of them.
 Of course, what you're saying is that it would be better for us to
simply pick them up and keep moving, finding more, because science
would benefit less. Hell, we should probably just leave all of the
worthless chondrites we find on the ground because they're useless
shit.

That seems to be what you're getting at.

> Do you really think, that there only 10 or 20 clowns are stumbling through
> half a continent to collect meteorites and that would be NWA? Man - you have
> not the slightest idea what for dimensions of time, distances and work it
> needs, that you get that rare stuff from Morocco delivered on your desk for
> a pocket money.

And you seem to have no conception of the amount of scientific data
that is now LOST and will NEVER be retrieved.
Thanks to you, me, and all of the other people involved in this business.
You can try to justify it by saying that it would take longer to do it
well, but honestly...thirty more years in the desert wouldn't change
most meteorites much. It's a moot point.

> And they have no coordinates. Bravo.
> Any institute here, any scientist there, who is willing to pay 250.000$ a
> gram for a lunar? Anyone out there, who likes to pay 1500$ instead of 30$
> for an Acapulcoite? Anyone from ANSMET there - man, in that few years, we
> two found so many CKs and Rs like the Antarctic teams would need more than a
> decade to find, and for all of them together we asked a price, just
> sufficient to pay the flight for one or two single scientists to Antarctica
> and back.
> The flights only.

You're just saying the same thing again and again...and again. Yes, I
know that the meteorites found still have scientific value.
No one's debating that.
Well, you are.
But that's not my point. My point is that a vast amount of data *is*
being lost, and you've yet to say ANYTHING that contradicts that
statement.


> Yah strewnfields, weathering, science.. - do it, instead of complaining.

I do. Here. In California. We've found over a hundred and fifty
meteorites on a single lakebed that was "searched out," representing
at least six or seven distinct falls (and I'm talking about an area
that's less than a square mile).
We found an Acapulcoite on another lakebed where we were told by
seasoned hunters that there wasn't much left to find.
And we've found a few sites of our own to hunt, and have been going at
them just as thoroughly.

But...this is a cop out. You're not affirming whether or not what is
being done is right or wrong. You're just asking me what I'm doing to
make it better.

And there's really nothing I can do. I have school, work, and a life
here, and I'm sorry, but I can't leave it.
Even if I could, I'm one hunter. That's a pretty damn big desert.
I'd be leaving my life here to provide science with a mere drop of
information in an otherwise empty desert. The way business is being
conducted simply means that regardless of whether or not teams went to
hunt there, undocumented meteorites would still stream out of NWA in
numbers likely comparable to what they've been in past years.

But that doesn't mean that we as a community haven't simply erased a
vast amount of scientific knowledge that we *could* have preserved.

I'm not saying that buying NWA meteorites is wrong or that they're
worthless. I'm just saying that we as a collecting, dealing
community, have helped to contribute to a vast gap in scientific
knowledge that we could have preserved had we gone about things in the
correct way.

And there's really nothing you can say to argue with that.

> Where are the official teams in Sahara? I know of not a single official
> expedition there. Where are they? There are enough meteorites left there to
> be discovered and to do all kind of field work on them.

Yeah, it's cheaper to rely on Moroccan labor to recover the stones for you.
I know.
It sucks.
It's economically not worthwhile to go and find them on your own when
you can buy them for $100/kg in Morocco while sipping tea in someone's
house.
And scientists are more content to study the rocks themselves, you
know that. With the vast influx of material coming in from NWA,
they've got enough on their plates already.
Which isn't to say that it wouldn't have been better for find
information to be received, but that's the price of convenience.
Those folks have Antarctica, and we have the NWA to plunder. They
spend their time hunting at the South Pole, and we take from NWA.

> Yah, they do have no coordinates.
> But for that, science and you get the stuff at a minute fraction of the
> costs of all the 200 years before and at a fraction of a fraction of a
> fraction if all these stones had to be found financed by public money with
> official expeditions. And you get such a broad choice, stones where 10, 15
> years nobody could even imagine, that they would exist at all.

It's not all about speed. You don't seem to understand that a
scientist could spend a lifetime working on a thin section of
Semarkona, analyzing individual grains and thus shedding light on the
early solar system. There's more material, NWA excluded, than all of
today's scientists could possibly exhaust in their lifetimes.
It would have been better if every stone were documented, etc. The
meteorites aren't going anywhere. And while we have, do, and will
continue to learn from these nameless stones, some of the knowledge we
could have gained is lost.

> Man, Jason, remember EUROMET?
> Check it out, they had annual expenses for personnel only, without that
> anyone even had set a foot over the doorstep of his bureau, of 8.5 millions
> ECU. ?ECU was the currency unit before EURO was introduced.
> Take additional inflation,
> They spent hence 20 millions of USD PER YEAR only for personnel, without
> devices, without equipment, without any expedition yet.
> Yaaabbayabbayabba - yes, they did also research, well understood.

BS. I did my own research.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:jhQ3IDMLruEJ:www.mna.it/english/Publications/TAP/TA_pdfs/Volume_01/TA_01_01_229_Mellini.pdf+euromet+meteorite&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Yeah, it costs that much -- but that's the combined cost of running 50
laboratories and paying 220 scientists. That says NOTHING about how
much it costs to find a meteorite. Moot point.

> But what can you buy for 20 millions? Jason, there do not exist enough
> lunaites on Earth, that you could spend 20 millions!
> If you buy all Eucrites, all Howardites, all Diogenites found ever over the
> whole planet and from all times (without of course the horribly expensive
> Antarctic finds) - you still will have left over a lot of that sum.
> Make a Bessey deal like in former times. 25$/kg for unclassified W3 OCs.
> But then you would have to give Dean a hint, wherefrom Dean should take 800
> tons of OCs, if the Catalogue lists only 700 tons of meteorites in history
> and on Earth and less than 40 tons are stones and the rest irons.

As said, moot point. You're looking at the cost of running
experiments, and, well, every expense of 220 scientists working in
state of the art laboratories. The physics lab I'm looking at working
in here has a budget of several million dollars, and it all goes into
materials and studies/testing. Either you don't understand how costly
it really is to study meteorites, you don't know how much it costs for
a flight to Morocco or Australia, or you're just spewing complete crap
in the hope that enough of it sticks to make me look wrong. I think I
know which of those is the truth.

> And - EUROMET was going in Sahara, yippieh, and they came back with
> absolutely empty hands. Wrong hunting area? I doubt. It was the
> Kem-Kem-region - exactly that region, where a little later the first
> hundredweights of meteorites were found by locals, marking the beginning of
> NWA.

Ok, here are a few more problems with your reasoning.
1) Irrelevant. If they were in the right place and didn't find
anything, well, if you've ever hunted for meteorites, you would know
that you can spend a week in the right place finding nothing, and find
ten stones the next day.
2) What's to say they were in the right place.
3) You're looking at a bunch of scientists. It took us a while to
find our first meteorite as well.
4) *If* they were in the right place, hundreds of kilograms of
meteorites had already been removed.
That would probably make remaining pieces much harder to find,
especially since they would have had no way to know if they were in
the right place or not because, guess what -- no coordinates.

> And you dare to complain about missing coordinates and you are maundering
> about shabby tricks of greedy hunters and dealers.

Hey, I'm just as guilty. Just pointing out that things could have
been run better from a scientific point of view, and not a single word
you've yet said has contradicted that notion in any way.

> Welcome, spend some GPS-devices. I suggest you pay the first 1000 units.

It doesn't make sense for any single person to foot the cost, and you
know it. Ideally, five or ten years ago, some of the few dealers
dealing with Moroccans at the time could have sold or traded locals
GPS units for meteorites, and in turn, agreed to pay them a more for
stones with coordinates in the future.

But, as has been said, that's just not in dealers' interests.

> Gosh, you have really no idea. Please, 3/4 or more of all those persons,
> you'd call a dealer are doing it for fun and never sat a foot into Sahara,
> they buy their stones on shows or from photos.

Maybe. I know that two of the folks who contacted me off-list have
been to Oman, but that's another red herring. You don't need to go to
NWA to understand that it doesn't take that much work or money to
collect adequate find data, at least on top of the amount of time and
money it takes to find a meteorite in the first place. You take the
GPS and hit "mark waypoint" and take a piece of tape with a number
written on it and stick it to the stone. Not hard.
It would take a few hundred GPS units, though - at a cost of probably
$50k or so.
- A drop in the bucket when you look at the net worth of the
meteorites that have come out of NWA in the past decade.

> Wherefrom the heck shall they know, how much paired material is around?
> Especially if it takes often up to 2 years until a number is published in
> the Bulletin? Man, take a look to the numbers, sometimes it takes many
> years, until an additional stone surfaces. Don't you even know famous NWA
> 011 - there are now pairings close to the 5000er numbers. Yeeeeeears
> inbetween. Or NWA 722 up to Anoual and even later!!

Ok. It would take a few years. The data would still be there and not
lost. Yes. True.
And I think that would be better than no data at all.
You're really not much of a scientist, are you?

> And do me a favour and show me the multimillionaires, who made their fortune
> with meteorites, no matter if they used shady tricks or not to betray you.
> I know only one, unfortunately a fictitious one: William Barriere from the
> Anti-dealer propaganda comic strips from Canada.

Never heard of him, but...again, you're just taking everything I said
to the absolute extreme.
No one made millions of dollars overnight, but many dealers exploited
the system to obtain hundreds of kilograms of undocumented stones
(myself included), picked out the rare material, and sold it to make a
profit.
If documentation were actually going on, and stones were coming out of
NWA, at, say, 1/10 the rate they did (there's no reason for such a
substantial decrease in rates, but let's suppose....), either prices
would have been ten times what they were or dealers would have made
less money.

That's simple math, and I really hope you understand this, because I
don't know how much more clear I can make it.

> Don't take my harshness too personally, had some bad days,
> But I think I can say, we all are soooo sick and tired from that hunter- and
> dealer-bashing.

It's not hunter-dealer bashing. It's saying you, and I, and everyone
else screwed up from a scientific point of view.
And that's true. We lost information because we wanted results fast.
That's bad science.

> Man, they make the dirty work,
> that work, nobody else is willing to do or able to do, neither the public
> willing nor able to pay. Blood, sweat and tears. And they are horribly
> underpaid, seen the performance they deliver day by day and the prices
> having been paid the 200 years before the NWA-rush.

Well I'm glad to hear that you sympathize with them and are now
offering to pay them $1/g for every find they make - more for rare
material. Pay them well, Martin. They deserve it.

> The stats and the history prooves that all more than clearly.
> Get scientific, Jason.

All stats and history say is that we could have retrieved the data
that has now been lost if we'd stopped simply buying as meteorites as
possible for as low a price as possible in the hopes of finding rare
ones in the mix and selling those for a profit.

> They do it for science, they do it for the collectors, they do it for you
> and they do it for their enthusiasm, because they are crazy minds.

The Moroccans? They're not doing it for the science, they're doing it
for the money. And the collectors (myself included) are the people
with a bit of that to trade for a rock, so I guess they're out there
for me, too, yeah. But while a few of them may be interested in the
science of it,that's just a tad romantic. You might as well say that
Chinese coal-miners are down there in the mines because they want to
make sure that Los Angeles gets its power. And while that's
indirectly true, you're taking things a bit far.
Don't get me wrong - I know of several Moroccan dealers who are very
into the science of it, at least as much as the average list-member,
and maybe more. But...hell, many, if not most hunters in Europe and
the US aren't really hunting for the science of it either. Sure they
hope to find a rare stone, but it's not because they want to further
our knowledge of the solar system. They want to make money, and
generally, be recognized for their achievement. You know that's true.

> They delivered the bulk of all meteorites on Earth, the very recent years in
> volumes and in a diversity, nobody could have imagined even only 10 years
> before,

Still more from Antarctica. Give it a year or so and you'll be right,
but that's not true as of right now.
I guess you might be right if you take into account common chondrites
sitting in boxes and bins that will likely never get classified, but
those are lost to science, so I don't see how you could reasonably
include them in your estimate.

> and they drove the prices underground seen the last 200 years, making
> meteorites available to each and every scientist and collector, and to
> everybody of good will, saving the public and science millions, millions and
> millions of funds, which are urgently needed elsewhere in meteoritic
> research.

Which isn't to say that the same things wouldn't have happened if they
hadn't been taking coordinates, and the process had taken maybe ten,
twenty, fifty, or a hundred more years. It's not like the meteorites
would disappear - but the find information is *gone.*

> And therefore we all are more than fed up with this perseverative
> reproaches, which really ignorant people like so much to heap on the
> dealers, the hunters, the collectors.

I'm included in that lot, don't worry. I know my place.
But, as a scientist, I'm pointing out that we acted hastily and in so
doing, lost a hell of a lot of valuable information.
And that's true. And I've said it ten bloody times.
This is getting frustrating.

> When will they do their homework, when will they get mature...
> We're writing the year 2010.
> Yaha, Ward, Nininger, Zeitschel... yes, they were disregarded as wretches
> too. Haven't we learned since?

Well, I don't know. Ward and Nininger carefully noted where each of
their finds were made. Zeitschel, I don't know...but we're all really
to blame for perpetuating this continued loss of scientific
information.

> Jason, check it out, where would we be today without the private sector,
> which you blame, to act so unscientifically.
> What for and how many meteorites would we have in the institutes and museums
> at all without them?

Fewer, but again. The meteorites wouldn't disappear, and they're a
limited resource. There's a finite amount of information there, and
we lost a substantial portion of it. Yes, fewer meteorites would be
available to science, but what I'm saying os that even if it took 100
more years, in the end, we would have more information. We've
destroyed a large part of it, and we can't get it back. Yep, saying
it again. Go figure.

> How many publications we would have without them?
> How many billions more would we have had to spend to get the same material?
> What for meteorites at all would be there.

Probably just as many. It's not like we would have run out of things
to study in known meteorites, and over time, we would have more
information to add to what we have today. It would simply take
longer.

You don't seem to understand that there aren't an unlimited number of
meteorites in the world, and that when data is lost, it's lost for
good.

When you understand that, you will be able to comprehend what I'm saying.
Until then, there's really nothing I can say to you regarding this
issue that will make any sense.

> What would we do know without them about the solar system, about planetary
> bodies and their formation. About the origin of the sun, the age and the
> composition of the Earth. About the formation of planets around other stars.
> About the possibility of life in space
> and finally about ourselves?

Maybe a little bit less, but in time we would *undoubtedly* come to
know more, because we wold ultimately have more meteorites to work
with and better distribution information, which might tell us other
things.
If we had taken longer to recover the meteorites, yes, we would have
fewer of them now, but...they're not going anywhere.

Whether I go to a lakebed to hunt tomorrow or ten years from now, that
meteorite will still be there. But if I go tomorrow and pick it up
without taking coordinates, in ten years, I won't know where to go to
find more, and no one will know where it was found. That's what I'm
saying.
And we could have done better as a community to keep that loss of
information from happening many thousands of times over. And you, and
I, and everyone else, didn't. That's all I'm saying. I'm not
pointing my finger at anyone - or at least if I am, it's pointed at
me, too. And I know my reasoning is pretty sound, and that you're
entire tirade was misdirect, misinformed, and generally misleading.
So...I'm content with leaving things here.


> Think well, Jason,
> and then be happy and grateful,
> that there are still persons willing to do that job.

I'd ask the same of you in the future. And perhaps you, as a dealer,
will pay those hard workers the money they deserve for the specimens
they bring you, since you're apparently underpaying them at the
moment.

Jason


>
>
>
>
>
> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
> [mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von Jason
> Utas
> Gesendet: Montag, 18. Januar 2010 22:57
> An: Greg Catterton; Meteorite-list
> Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Pairing discussion/questions
>
> Hello Greg, All,
>
> This brings up a valid point - when total known weights have increased
> since initial reporting, I believe that dealers should be obligated to
> change their numbers. ?Otherwise they are *lying* about what they're
> selling. ?The total known weight of Taza is not 75 kilograms, the
> total known weight of Franconia is not 100 kilograms, and we all know
> there's more of a few NWA's like 3118 and 2086 than any one person
> could shake a stick at. ?The only time anyone actually seems to keep
> any sort of track of a new meteorite's whereabouts *to any degree* is
> when it's a planetary meteorite - otherwise pairings tend to be
> ignored.
> But this makes sense - think about it from a dealer's perspective.
> Would you want to list the tkw of a stone you're selling as "unknown,
>> than 20 kilograms," or would you prefer it to be the "official" ~700
> grams.
> It makes sense for the sellers to use the outdated information, and
> they've been able to get away with it until now, not that things are
> going to change any time soon.
>
> This situation is wholly unscientific, and while we've been calling it
> a meteorite "rush" for a while, in the end, we dealers and collectors
> are the ones who made it financially viable for the locals to start
> implementing this kind of a recovery process in which almost all find
> data is lost (though there have been plenty of other instances of
> unscientific behavior in the field - e.g. the Nova stones - also due
> to a dealer looking to maximize profits - and the "Sahara XXxxx"
> stones, for which coordinates have still yet to be released - and I'm
> thinking they likely never will be). ?Then, of course, you have the
> issue with finders misreporting coordinates for rare finds in Oman,
> blatantly lying to the scientific community about where they have
> found their stones. ?It's one thing to say that you won't give the
> coordinates up; it's another entirely to lie. ?Yes, I understand why
> they're doing it, but...damn. ?If you lie, you should lose credibility
> -- and no one here seems to care.
>
> I suppose the bottom line is that we're dealing with an unregulated
> system in which no one has any reason to publish any such data.
> There's just no reason to, so....yeah. ?Ideally, every stone would be
> GPS'ed, photographed in-situ, and the truth would be told, but that
> would take for more time and money than most people apparently want to
> put into it. ?And people would get screwed by competitors stealing
> their hard-earned data, robbing their strewn-fields. ?Hell, the
> Moroccans now have the funds to buy their own GPS' anyways. ?I'd say
> there's a reason they likely don't buy them and use them; they
> probably want to keep their find locations a secret as well.
>
> And then everyone gets pissed when an American hunter keeps a fall
> location a secret because he wants to document every piece well.
>
> Go figure.
>
> Jason
>
>
>
>
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Received on Tue 19 Jan 2010 02:43:07 AM PST