Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
stuff. A few will be the commonest sort of chondrite, the size of an olive or an egg, some
withanicelymeltedfusioncrust,thefieryresultoffallingfastthroughthesky.Thestarting
price is always way too high. If you say they're too common, a second, smaller bag may
appear, perhaps with an iron meteorite or something even more exotic.
Irecall one deal worked byourguide, Abdullah, ona dusty side road a few miles east of
Skoura. The seller, a distant acquaintance of questionable integrity, called by satellite and
demanded secrecy. “It might be a Martian,” he told Abdullah. “Nine hundred grams. Just
twenty thousand dirhams.” About $2,400—if it was real, if it could be added to the two
dozen or so known meteorites that came from Mars, it'd be a bargain. They arranged the
time and place. Two nondescript cars pulled up beside each other; three of us got out and
stood in a tight circle. The rock in question was lovingly slipped from a velvet pouch. But
it looked like an ordinary rock (as do all Martian meteorites). The price dropped to fifteen
thousand dirhams. Then twelve thousand. But there was no way to be sure, so we passed.
Later Abdullah confided to me that he had been tempted, but there are always more met-
eorites. It's best not to be too greedy with one big score; no one tells the truth, and all deals
are final.
AsinAntarctica,theequatorialdesertsrevealthenaturaldistributionofallkindsofmet-
eorites, providing unrivaled clues to the character of the early Solar System and thus the
origins of our own planet. Sadly, unlike meteorites from Antarctica, most of these speci-
mens will never make it tomuseum collections forat least tworeasons. First andforemost,
the growing community of amateur collectors (fueled by a few wealthy aficionados and
the readily available Saharan finds) is intensely competitive. Anything rare sells quickly
and for a lot of money. Some of those specimens will surely wind up as donations to mu-
seums, but most are poorly handled, and much of the scientific value in a pristine find is
soon lost by contamination from unprotected hands, multipurpose cloth bags, and the ubi-
quitous camel dung. Equally troubling is the lack of any useful documentation, as to when
or where in the desert the meteorites were found. All the dealers will say is “Morocco,”
which is usually a falsehood, as most of the sandy Sahara lies to the east, in Algeria and
Libya—countries from which it is now illegal to import specimens. So without rigorous
documentation,mostmuseumssimplywillnotaccept“Moroccan”or“NorthAfrican”met-
eorites.
Inthosehostile,aridterrainsoftheSahara,ortheicefieldsofAntarctica,anyrockstands
out as a foreign object fallen from the sky. Such an unadulterated sampling of the meteor-
ite population gives scientists their best view of the earliest stages of the Solar System in
which Earth formed. Chondrites represent almost nine out of every ten finds; the rest are
the diverse achondrites, belonging to the few-million-years era when our young Solar Sys-
tem was a turbulent nebula, in which chondrites clumped together into larger and larger
bodies: first the size of your fist, then the size of your car, then a small city—billions of
Search WWH ::




Custom Search