ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

MY GRANDMOTHER-IN-LAW’S very own meteorite came hurtling down from outer
space on 2 August 1946, just after the family pushed back their chairs from
the dining table in the ranch house outside Marathon, in the Trans-Pecos
region of far west Texas. Meteorites are far more common than most people
realise, but they can be difficult to spot. If you are serious about collecting
them, it helps to have a lot of dry desert landscape on which specimens
can fall.

This particular aerolite shook windows and rattled crockery on its way.
‘It sounded like thunder,’ grandmother says, ‘except that the sun was still
shining outside.’ The sonic boom, of course, was the result of an entry
speed probably in excess of 50 000 kilometres per hour.

The meteorite splashed down in the dammed-up waters of Pena Blanca Springs,
showering water over two passing cowboys less than 50 metres away in a pick-up
truck: a highly fortuitous circumstance, as it turned out. For one thing,
the cowhands were spared instant immolation. And the meteorite itself landed
in a body of water; otherwise it would probably have shattered into a zillion
pieces on impact. Ironically, it also made eventual recovery of the meteorite
that much easier. Instead of scouring the countryside for widely scattered
fragments, the family simply drained the pond.

The first amateur scientist on the scene was one Oscar Monnig of Fort
Worth, who stayed for a week. He went on to become a department store magnate,
and, in the process, amassed one of the largest private meteorite collections
in the world. Grandmother, a devotee of beef, remembers him as a vegetarian
at a time when leaf-eaters in Texas were as rare as, well, meteorites. ‘It
presented something of a problem,’ she admits, ‘but I think he liked the
±è´Ç³Ù²¹³Ù´Ç±ð²õ.’

Oscar organised the draining of the springs. Eventually he recovered
about 70 kilograms of what proved to be an aubrite achondrite, one of the
world’s rarest types of meteorite. Only 11 other falls of similar material
are known to exist. Three of those have landed in the continental United
States of America; the other two homed in on Cumberland Falls, Kentucky,
and Norton County, Kansas. Meteorites take their names from features of
the landscape close to where they fall. Grandmother-in-law’s is the Pena
Blanca Springs Meteorite.

You can now purchase slices and small pieces of the meteorite from which
my grandmother’s cosmic inheritance came. It costs $20 the gram, from Robert
A. Haag, the self-styled ‘Meteorite Man’, of Tucson (Box 27527, Tucson,
AZ 85726). Actually, you can shop by mail for parts of the meteorite that
Haag recently purchased from the other side of the family. Grandmother’s
sizeable portion is safely ensconced behind glass, thank you, and Haag is
keeping a large, 22-kilogram chunk of the Pena Blanca Springs meteorite
for his own personal collection.

Last year Haag did half a million dollars worth of business in mail-order
meteorites. He and his staff of between six and eight people expect to exceed
a million dollars in sales this year, minus the considerable expenses they
need to collect the meteorites. Haag has just returned from the first-ever
Japanese meteorite show in Tokyo, where he did handsomely, with an estimated
total of $100 000 in sales.

At 33 years old, Haag has been a professional dealer in meteorites for
the past 10 years. He says he’s in the business for the ‘love of being able
to touch outer space’, but there seems to be a bit of the allure of adventure
and sheer glamour about it, too. At least, his jaunty poses in pictures
make meteorite hunting look romantic enough. His 30-page catalogue poses
him in all sorts of exotic locales, including Chile, Egypt and the outback
of Australia. If Indiana Jones were alive, I am sure that he would have
long ago given up archaeological artefacts for space rocks.

Haag’s main competitors in the US are the husband-and-wife team of Ron
and Diane Farrell, who operate the Bethany Trading Post (Box 3726, New Haven,
CT 06525). Their 12-page catalogue leans a mite more towards educating the
general public about meteorites. In fact, Farrell, by day an aircraft engineering
manager with Sikorsky, which makes helicopters, has recently signed an agreement
with a consortium of European planetariums for them to distribute his catalogue
as educational material. He hopes the benefits will prove reciprocal. ‘Most
of us probably come in contact with a meteorite at least once in our life,’
Farrell says, ‘without recognising it for what it is.’ He cites the highly
successful precedent set by the late Harvey Nininger, who began his career
as a biologist, and wound up as one of America’s foremost meteoriticists,
with more than 160 articles and several books to his credit.’ Once he began
lecturing to farmers, he drug in tons of stuff that otherwise would never
have been recovered.’ Farrell himself delivers an hour-long lecture, illustrated
with slides, to numerous high schools, colleges and amateur astronomy clubs
each year.

Farrell admits he lacks the requisite degrees in the science of meteorites
that would lend his works the official stamp of approval. But he does not
consider himself a bullish amateur in the scientific china shop. In fact,
Farrell is currently engaged on a research project with two Connecticut
universities, centred around excavations at Meteor Crater, Arizona. He is
also working on a book about meteorites for a general audience. His meteorite
catalogue presently reaches about 2000 private collectors, and he deals
directly and regularly with a dozen museums and private institutions.

Both he and Haag are adept at deflecting criticism, particularly the
charge that they might be interfering with the recovery or preservation
of specimens coveted for research. Farrell says that most of his pickings
follow in the wake of museums and institutions, and that he provides a commendable
public service by offering the remaining specimens for sale. ‘From what
I can tell,’ he says, ‘the high schools and smaller colleges are absolutely
delighted to have this material on hand.’ Haag argues that most of the private
collections eventually wend their way to public display, anyway. ‘Invariably,
they end up donated to a museum,’ he says. ‘In the meantime, financially
strapped institutions are only too happy to benefit from the public sector’s
³¦´Ç²Ô³Ù°ù¾±²ú³Ü³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô²õ.’

Farrell, in fact, offers up some criticisms of his own. ‘Meteorites
are our under-utilised passport to outer space,’ he says, ‘but they’ve only
been seriously examined over the past 20 years. We spend billions of dollars
every year researching outer space, while outer space falls to Earth every
day.’ He, too, insists that he is in the business for the love, and not
the money, while declining to discuss figures. Farrell fears that, although
the market is fairly strong now, ‘future supplies may not be able to keep
up with demand’.

Meanwhile, all is not necessarily rosy between competitors in meteorite
land. Farrell claims that he had an understanding with Haag and another
party to split the Pena Blanca Springs specimen three ways when the family
finally sold it. ‘I doubt seriously I’ll ever see my third,’ he says. ‘If
you want to know the truth, I’m a little miffed at the moment.’

* * *

On the trail of Antarctic meteorites

ANTARCTICA serves as an ideal deep-freeze storehouse for the thousands
of meteorites that have fallen there over the past 200 000 years or so.
They stay on the ice in almost the state in which they fell.

Some weathering is inevitable; erosion by wind plus the steady disintegration
as water repeatedly freezes and thaws. But in most cases, this alteration
is limited to the outer skin of the specimens.

This valuable meteorite resource has been tapped by the Japanese and
the Americans, who both have full collection teams visiting the Antarctic
each year. The American programme, called ANSMET, Antarctic Search for Meteorites,
has fielded a team each season since 1976, under the leadership of Bill
Cassidy, from the University of Pittsburgh.

ANSMET sends all the meteorites it collects to NASA’s Antarctic Meteorite
Curatorial Facility, in Houston, Texas, where they are classified and catalogued.
NASA sends out an up-to-date list of new meteorites approximately four times
a year, so that scientists can ask for material of particular interest and
relevance to their research.

Meteorites are a natural space probe – an inexpensive way of exploring
our Solar System. Most meteorites come from the asteroid belt, between Mars
and Jupiter, and possibly from comets. Several come from the Moon, and there
are at least eight that almost certainly come from Mars.

Most meteorites are older than the oldest rocks on Earth, and so can
tell us a great deal about processes that were going on when the Solar System
formed, some 4500 million years ago. In addition, one class of meteorites,
the chondrites, contain tiny amounts of material that scientists believe
came from outside the Solar System, such as diamonds from interstellar space.

Antarctica has boosted the world’s collection of meteorites by more
than 10 000 fragments, many of which are unusual specimens not found elsewhere.
All who work on meteorites appreciate the importance of regular visits to
the continent to collect these specimens.

I have been involved in research into carbon and nitrogen isotopes in
meteorites since 1979, and have long held an ambition to take part in the
American collection programme. I applied to Cassidy in 1985, and had to
wait until a vacancy arose. In 1988 I was lucky, and was selected to join
the ANSMET 1988/89 team. A generous travel grant from the Trans-Arctic Association
enabled me to join this group.

I left England in the middle of a dismal November, to travel to Christchurch,
New Zealand, where a beautiful hot summer was just beginning. Our team of
eight (six men, two women) spent a week there, being fitted for our polar
clothes. Then, we flew to McMurdo, the American base on Antarctica, where
we spent a further 10 days checking our field equipment, seeing that there
were sufficient tent pegs, that the stoves worked and so on.

We also spent time organising food; we worked in pairs, two to a tent,
and each pair had to choose enough food for the seven weeks to be spent
on the ice. My tent mate was Roberta (Robbie) Score, a researcher from NASA
at Houston. We became firm friends. Eventually, when we were ready, we flew
by C-130 Hercules aircraft to Lewis Cliff, about 250 kilometres away from
the South Pole.

The search for meteorites began almost straight away. On the first day,
we found nearly 40, a lot more than we anticipated. By the end of the field
season, we had found well over 1000 meteorites, more than any previous team.
Part of our good fortune was due to favourable weather; the average temperature
was -18 Degree C, and the wind speed 20 knots. There were very few days
on which the weather was too bad to go out searching.

Our camp was about 2 kilometres from the collection area, at a spot
where snow on the ice made it easier to pitch the tents. The four bright
yellow tents were each 3 metres square, with a small round entrance hole,
positioned to face downwind. Inside, they were cramped but comfortable,
with three single-burner spirit stoves for warmth and cooking.

The food we cooked was simple, but nutritious, chosen to be easy to
prepare. A typical evening meal would be a tin of tomatoes boiled with frozen
chicken and rice, all in the same pan. It tasted good after a hard day out
on the ice. A day’s work might last up to 12 hours, and, of course, we could
not take out a packed lunch, since commodities such as bread and fresh fruit
were not available. Most midday meals were cream crackers and peanut butter,
and a thermos flask of soup.

We were encouraged to have a high calorie intake, to combat the cold,
so weate two small bars of chocolate per day. Hygiene, both domestic and
personal, was basic, to say the least. Washing only once a week made the
first shower back in civilisation seem very good indeed.

We had Christmas Day as a holiday, and slept late, till 11 o’clock.
We all crowded into one tent to have Christmas lunch together, and each
pair provided a course: shrimps in cocktail sauce, bean salad, boiled turkey
roll with tinned potatoes, frozen broccoli, cranberry sauce and stuffing,
cheesecake and Christmas cake, all washed down with instant powdered egg-nog
mix – wonderful! Even more exciting than Christmas was 27 December, when
we had a mail-drop of extra fuel and equipment, plus letters. This was our
first contact with home since leaving in November. But did I really need
to know that the mortgage rate had gone up, and the car had failed its MOT
test? We made the trip back to McMurdo via the South Pole (marked by a mirrored
ball on what looks like a red and white striped barber’s pole, surrounded
by the flags of all the nations that have signed the Antarctic Treaty).
We had a 40-minute visit to the American base there and, in particular,
its small galley, where we had our first ‘real food’ for seven weeks.

As we arrived, the chef had just finished her batch of onion bagels,
on the menu for lunch that day. She had not taken into account the arrival
of a remote field party. Excited by the smell of freshly baked bread, we
practically scoffed the lot in under 10 minutes. Then it was back to reality.
I took home tennis elbow and a sprained ankle as souvenirs of my Christmas
visit to the Antarctic ice.

Dennis Stacy is a science writer based in San Antonio, Texas. Monica
Grady is a geochemist working on extraterrestrial material at the Open University
Milton Keynes.