[meteorite-list] Pairing discussion/questions

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:53:07 +0100
Message-ID: <006e01ca98aa$2660a290$07b22959_at_name86d88d87e2>

Jason, Jason, Jason..

...sometimes I can't believe, what you're writing.

Tell me examples for misrepresented coordinates from Oman!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Aaaaand now to NWA.

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.

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).

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.

Alone with NWA we are in less than 9 years at number 6000.
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.
In the Bulletins you see from Sahara only the tip of the iceberg, the best
of the best.
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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.
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!!

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.


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.

Years and years and years. Endlessly.

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

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.

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?


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?
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.

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?

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

Amen.
Martin




 

-----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
Received on Mon 18 Jan 2010 08:53:07 PM PST