Oh yes. If authentic, they can go for hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on size and features.
See my later posts in this thread, a few small pieces have been sold at $750 a gram. The biggest I’ve seen sold yet is a 5.3 gram for $4000.
And yet, the dealers selling those small pieces aren’t really making much profit. They have driven or flown hundreds or thousands of miles and spent days in hotels while searching, had to pay landowners for any found on public land or bought pieces from locals, then paid for the trip home. They might be lucky to break even on selling a few grams at that price.
There are now heavy rains in the area, so what has been recovered already is pretty much all there will be. The supply is a thousand times less than the demand.
Here’s a composite image I’ve made (using this video), showing that the Ohio meteor flared at least twice; perhaps some of the tektites were ejected during these events.
Tektites are terrestrial rock melted and ejected from large impact events, the Ohio rock was millions of times too small to generate tektites (and would have left a crater miles across if it was big enough).
So the Ohio meteor did not generate tektites per se, then.
Glassy fragments do seem to have been ejected at some point, unless the fragments shown earlier are not associated with this fall.
I think that the bright explosions seen in meteors like this occur when the atmosphere becomes dense enough to disrupt the physical cohesion of the object, although at least a part of this one seems to travelled onwards for some small length of time.
Glassy fusion crust is a characteristic of some types of achondrite meteorites, and is distinctively recognizable. In fact, the very first piece of the meteorite posted to the internet was on Reddit, and I was the first person to suggest that it might be an achrondite
The outside appearance of many Achondrites is similar to that of other stony meteorites, however several of the Achondrites have fusion crusts that are strikingly different. Eucrites for example because of their chemistry have a very shiny black fusion crust.
TL : DR - if you find a really cool rock, chances are, it’s not a meteorite.
I mean, there are a lot of rocks on Earth. So many that we named the planet after them. So just by the numbers, it’s probably an Earth rock.
Even if it looks really weird, because the Earth has a lot of weird rocks, too.
And if it looks like something that couldn’t possibly have naturally formed on Earth, then it’s probably still from Earth, and just not natural.
Right, cold finds of old meteorites in random non-desert locations are exceedingly rare.
As an update, a total of more than 100 of the Ohio fragments have found, and two more small ones from the Texas fall.
Even with modern computerized estimates of the fall zone, the act of meteorite chasing still strikes me as the craziest sort of low likelihood goose chase. As in:
OK team, we’ve narrowed the fall area to 1000 square miles of Iowa farmland and forest. In which there are probably about 5,000 lbs of space sand and pebbles, plus a few dozen golf to tennis ball sized chunks. Let’s go get 'em!! [ragged cheer from your intrepid followers; all 3 of them].
For sure it’s easier in a desert than a swamp, forest, or farmland. Or ocean. But that’s still far from easy. As in simply bordering on the impossible.
Am I wrong? How / why? I don’t mean to pooh-pooh. I just mean to express my admiration and mystification about what seems a nigh-impossible task. One that people still quest after and actually succeed at often enough.
What makes it easier to find them in a desert is that they last much, much longer. The largest piece of the Ohio meteorite (506 grams) was found in a shallow hole it had created for itself. There probably are at least a couple of more pieces that size out there, but thanks to today’s rain the holes in soft ground will have partially filled back in. The window for being likely to find them has already closed. Maybe a piece will be plowed up and recognized in some future year, maybe it is lost forever. Also, most common types of meteorites (but not this one) contain some amount of unoxidized iron. Which exposed to water rusts, swells, and fractures the meteorite. Therefore they don’t last as long as terrestrial rocks. But in hard-pan deserts meteorites can remain intact and visible for thousands of years. Since people started seriously searching the Sahara desert around 2000, for instance, many tons of meteorites have been found, from hundreds of falls and tens of thousands if not over a hundred thousand pieces. The number there has of course been massively depleted but they are still being found today. Now there are hunters in the Atacama in Peru finding them. (There are undoubtedly tons of meteorites in sandy deserts, too, but they are inconviently under the dunes.)
An interesting thing about Sahara meteorites is that iron ones are very rare, far less common than the rate at which they fall. And that’s because they were collected and used for making iron tools thousands of years ago. The locals walked or rode their camels past stony meteorites sitting on the surface for thousands of years before crazy Westerners willing to pay for them made them worth noticing.
ETA Mars is a good analog for Earth’s deserts. Most stony meteorites probably don’t survive in recognizable form after hitting Mars because the thin atmosphere doesn’t slow them much, but some iron meteorites do. And in the very small part of the surface of Mars photographed by rovers around a half dozen recognizable iron meteorites have been found. The whole surface of Mars must have millions of intact iron meteorites sitting on the surface.
This is a few of my Sahara desert meteorites (but not on Sahara sand). The largest one in the top center is 186 grams, so somewhere around a kilo for the whole group. And I paid much less for all of them than the price of one gram of the Ohio fall.
BTW, here’s a nice news video about pros and a local kid finding Ohio meteorites.
https://fox8.com/news/medina-6th-graders-meteorite-find-goes-viral-for-sweet-reason/
@LSLGuy, you were mentioning the long shot for finding meteorites. The guy in the blue shirt mentioning being in London is Michael Farmer, probably the world’s top meteorite hunter. A month ago he was in Uzbekistan looking for a fall there, but he didn’t find any and the government seized everything that was found. The reason he was in London when he heard about the Ohio fall was because he had been in Germany hunting the fall from two weeks ago (and came up with nothing, as did almost everyone else). In Ohio he found 4 stones, probably less than 20 grams total.
The NOVA program about Chelyabinsk, which my local station still plays occasionally, said that scientists had a much easier time finding meteorites because there was snow on the ground, and they found quite a few on a frozen lake.
You might like reading this 7 part entry on hunting Chelyabinsk
Much, much more of Chelyabinsk has been recovered than Ohio. But it was also a much larger rock.
More specimens
I do remember when Chelyabinsk happened, and the news was showing all these videos from people when their windows shattered, and wondered what Russian-speaking people were thinking: “Does the network know what those people were saying?” In the NOVA broadcast, there’s a LOT of bleeping.
Another 500ish gram chunk of Ohio has been found
One of Curry’s fake meteorites just showed up on Reddit!
Check put the crazy certificate.
BTW, here’s the The Verge article on the internet archive, where it isn’t paywalled.
“As Copyrighted above, pursuant All Rights Reserved”?