by Robert Verish

Note From the Field: Record the "Time of Day" for each Recovered Meteorite

It was just a little more than a year ago that I half-jokingly suggested, "If the current rate of meteorite-recovery persisted, it may become necessary to record the time-of-day!" And if there is any interest in keeping a proper chronological order of meteorite finds, it now appears that this will, indeed, become a prudent thing to do. Certainly in the case of meteorite-recovery on dry lakes where finds are numbered, this could become an issue, especially when there are a number of team members making finds during the course of the day. And in other cases when there are several finders for the same meteorite, where the person to make the FIRST find becomes the "Finder" of record in the Meteoritical Bulletin, this could become an important issue. So, along with recording the coordinates of each find, the recording of the time of recovery could become a vital piece of data, at least for record-keeping purposes. Fortunately, most GPS units record either GMT or Local Time whenever a waypoint is taken.

Why I say, "NOW appears to be a prudent thing to do" is because of the recent activity this past weekend on a local dry lake. TRUE, this past weekend was a "holiday weekend", but I am not "half-joking" this time when I say that this is only a harbinger of things to come soon. At times during the course of one day, there were several teams, and as many as eight people, searching for meteorites in this general area of Southern California. By the end of the day, there were 6 individual, ordinary chondritic stone fragments found. In time, it will be ascertained who exactly made these finds, and more importantly, WHEN (what time-of-day) these weathered stones were found. Obviously, this will be important to any person, such as myself, that has an interest in maintaining a chronological order to the numbering sequence that will be assigned to these finds when they are eventually reported.

Examples of some recent finds:

The topic of my next few articles will continue a series on California and Nevada Meteorites.

My previous articles can be found *HERE*

For for more information, please contact me by email: Bolide*chaser