Nevada Meteorite Picture of the Day

Explanation:

Today's "Picture of the Day" is of the eastern shoreline of a small dry lake in Nye County known as Bonnie Claire Dry Lake. There is no meteorite in this image, at least none that I could find. But on another nearby dry lake there were two meteorites found by Nick Gessler - the Bonnie Claire 001 & Bonnie Claire 002 meteorites. Respectively, they are now the 6th and 7th meteorite finds reported for the state of Nevada. The dry lake they were found on is an unnamed mud flat in a broad valley known as Sarcobatus Flat. Close by to this mud flat is a mining camp, known as Bonnie Claire, which lends its name to these meteorites.

The peculiar thing about these two meteorites is that they were found only 1meter apart from each other, yet they are from two different meteorite falls. Although they are both classified as "H5", they are definitely unpaired. Actually, this is not an uncommon occurance - on dry lakes. Increasingly, there are more and more instances of multiple finds being made in proximity to each other. Evidence is accumulating that most meteorites found on dry lakes have been transported by nature to areas of accumulation called stranding surfaces.

Today's pictures could be one such "stranding surface". At the time that these images were taken the thin sheets (or rafts) of ice that "bull-dozed" these shoreline rocks into these piles and lineations, was just receding back out into the lake. Another shift in the wind and these sheets of ice could have come back onto the shore and "bull-dozed" even more rocks into these piles. Over geologic-time, the energy coupling wind with water (waves & ice-rafts) would eventually transport the meteorites on these dry lakes to the shorelines.

(Scale is 4.5ft long metal detector)