[meteorite-list] "On the Hunt for Kansas Meteorites"

[Notkin]

Dear Listees:

Good morning all. Very good article (with photo) about Steve's Brenham 
adventures in today's "Wichita Eagle."

You may even recognize some of the characters mentioned in the story. I 
count five Meteorite List members quoted in the one piece.


Regards,

Geoff N.


********************


http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/13379891.htm


On the hunt for Kansas meteorites

Wichita native and meteorite hunter Steve Arnold, who dug up a 
1,400-pound specimen near Greensburg, is turning his finds into cash.

BY KEVIN MURPHY

Kansas City Star


GREENSBURG - Bouncing over the dirt rows of the newly planted wheat 
field, Steve Arnold's contraption of plastic pipes mounted on six 
lawnmower wheels looks mighty strange.

And then there is Arnold--pulling the rig behind him while a plastic 
bucket containing a metal detector hangs around his neck.

Odd as he looks out there in the field, Arnold has brought a new and 
lucrative form of farming to south-central Kansas: He harvests 
meteorites.

"A cash crop," Arnold says, beaming.

It certainly can be.

Last month, Arnold announced that he had dug up near Greensburg a 
1,400-pound pallasite meteorite, the largest of its type ever found in 
the United States. It could be worth at least $1 million, possibly up 
to $3 million, experts said.

The owner of the land where Arnold found his prize will get a nice cut 
of the sale price. Arnold has signed leases with the owners of some 
3,000 acres to look for meteorites. He pays them up front for hunting 
rights, and they get a share of his sales.

"I've never heard of anyone doing that before," said Jeffrey Grossman, 
a geochemist and secretary of the Meteoritical Society, an 
international planetary science organization.

Arnold's partner and lawyer, Phil Mani of San Antonio, Texas, set up 
the recent contracts and paid expenses for Arnold's prospecting in 
Kansas. Mani said the contracts are a first and are necessary because 
meteorites are otherwise the property of owners of the land where they 
fall.

"We are going to cover all the land where we think meteorites can be 
found," Mani said.

Arnold, a Wichita native, makes his living trading and selling 
meteorites, which are sought after by museums and universities and by 
collectors tantalized by the other-world nature of such rocks. 
Meteorites come from the asteroid belt formed at the dawn of the solar 
system about 4.3 billion years ago.

"It's from out there on the other side of Mars. How cool is that?" 
Arnold said. "You can own something that has not changed since the 
beginning of the solar system."

Meteorites, most smaller than grapefruits, are sold over the Internet 
and at shows. Arnold's is being kept in Texas and will be displayed at 
a major gem and mineral show in Tucson next month.

News of his discovery spread fast, landing Arnold on several national 
news shows and stirring envy in the meteorite community.

"Its overwhelming size and shape make it truly unique," said Allan 
Lang, a well-known meteorite dealer in upstate New York.

Meanwhile, Arnold is back in the field looking for more. His 
high-powered metal detector can pick up signals 20 feet below ground, 
he said.

"There may be something bigger, but I doubt there is something better," 
Arnold said.

Arnold's meteorite is dark orange to bronze in color, measures about 36 
by 30 inches and has a rare bullet-like shape and smooth surface. 
Pallasite meteorites such as Arnold's are made of iron nickel and 
olivine crystals and account for less than 1 percent of all discovered 
meteorites, which are rare in the first place.

A bounty of meteorites

Kansas is a leading source of meteorite discoveries in the United 
States, authorities say. The state is extensively farmed, and it has 
relatively little foliage and few indigenous rocks that people may 
confuse with meteorites, said Geoffrey Notkin, an Arizona meteorite 
hunter who has sometimes helped Arnold search in Kansas.

Another reason is that 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, the Greensburg area 
was pelted with meteorites from what later was named the Brenham 
meteorite, after the township where some pieces landed.

Prehistoric Indians gathered the fragments as religious symbols, and 
the first documented collections occurred in the 1880s. In the 1920s, 
famed meteorite collector Harvey Nininger found a crater from one point 
of impact, and he encouraged residents to look for meteorites.

The Brenham meteorites are in collections worldwide, including at 
Harvard and Yale universities, the Smithsonian Institution and in an 
exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The previous largest meteorite was found in 1949 and is on display at a 
Greensburg museum that also is home to the world's largest hand-dug 
well. Greensburg is a town of 1,500, about 110 miles west of Wichita.

Meteorite hunting has tapered off in the Greensburg area in recent 
decades as people assumed fields had been tapped out. But Arnold did 
some research that showed otherwise, though he declined to be specific.

"There's an element of a good old-fashioned treasure hunt to it, 
complete with a treasure map," said Arnold, who lives in northern 
Arkansas but bought a house in Greensburg to serve as a search base.

Arnold's German-made metal detector can find metal much deeper than 
most detectors. The coil of the detector is mounted on the flat 
trailer-like rig that he pulls behind an all-terrain vehicle. A cable 
connects the coil to the detector control box in the bucket around his 
neck. When the detector squeals, signaling a find, he slowly pulls the 
rig by hand to pinpoint the location.

While he has found a few meteorites, he also has collected a tub of 
rusted metal items from bygone days of farming -- a buckle from a 
horse-drawn plow, horseshoes, a ring from a bull's nose, steel wagon 
wheels.

Most items are near the surface, but the big meteorite was much deeper. 
Arnold dug down 2 feet by hand and then got a backhoe. Seven feet 
below, he unearthed the meteorite of a lifetime.

A unique specimen

The significance of Arnold's meteorite lies in its size and shape 
because many specimens have been studied from the same meteor breakup, 
authorities said.

"Unless this one has some very unusual internal structure, it probably 
will not advance the science significantly," said Randy Van Schmus, 
geology professor and meteorite expert at the University of Kansas. "As 
a collector's item, it would have extremely high value. It's a very 
significant find and a very good museum specimen."

Denton Ebel, assistant curator of earth and planetary sciences at the 
American Museum of Natural History, said the meteorite would probably 
bring at least $1 million.

Small pieces of pallasite meteorites from Kansas have sold for about $4 
to $5 a gram, collector Lang said, which would make Arnold's meteorite 
worth from $2.5 million to more than $3 million if cut up and every 
piece got sold.

Mani and Arnold believe, however, that the meteorite may be valuable in 
one piece because of its size and shape. They would like to see it on 
museum display.

"That's my hope and everything is negotiable," Arnold said. "If someone 
is willing to offer significantly more than someone else, it is theirs 
and they can do what they want with it."

Arnold's discovery of the bigger meteorite cuts both ways for 
tourist-conscious Greensburg.

On the one hand, Greensburg no longer can claim to have the biggest 
pallasite meteorite. But publicity over the new meteorite is a chance 
for Greensburg to plug its own meteorite--still a unique piece, museum 
manager Richard Stephenson said.

"It's in our brochure, but we don't even have a T-shirt with a 
meteorite on it," Stephenson said.

Museum employee Helen Schrader said the museum may not have to worry 
about being outdone by Arnold's find.

"If they cut that one up to sell it," she mused, "we would still have 
the largest."