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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