Superior Valley 014, acapulcoite

Our first “meteorite hunt” was in Gold Basin in 1999, but we went on our first cold hunts a year or so later.

I was 12 years old.  Peter and I had been interested in meteorites for a few years.  We had no idea what we were doing or what to really look for.  Melted black things with thumb-prints and flow lines?  I distinctly remember looking for something like Millbillillie, or the howardite Great Sand Sea 010.  Grey interior, shiny black crust.  That’s what meteorites look like, right?

Not so much

After a few fruitless trips to dry lakes, we decided to focus on Superior Valley.  Robert Matson offered some guidance at the time: we talked about a few different lakebeds.  Cuddeback, Lucerne, Harper, Superior Valley.  Superior was pretty close.  It was probably hunted out, but there might be a few stones left?

We drove to the Westernmost lakebed in the valley, where only a few meteorites had been found.  The shorelines of the lake were wall-to-wall dark stones, for hundreds of yards.  It was hopeless.

So, we wandered into the middle of the lake; there weren’t too many stones, but there were .50 caliber bullets and pieces of bomb shrapnel all around us as we walked.  We picked up any stone that was magnetic.

A few days later, we found ourselves on the 4th floor at UCLA’s geology building, at Dr. Alan Rubin’s door, with a handful of magnetic stones.  He thought one of them looked more promising than the others.  It stuck strongly to a magnet.  It was promptly cut — and showed visible metal flakes and chondrules!  Superior Valley 012, H4, S1, W3.

It was a small, rusty-brown rock — a little shiny, polished by the wind.  It showed us what to look for.

We returned to the Easternmost lakebed a few weeks later, and found a few stones over a three day weekend.  The first stone was a freshly fusion-crusted pea, Superior Valley 013.  This was the second find from the trip.  Here’s the Meteoritical Bulletin write-up:

writeup

 

This stone was described in detail in Alan Rubin’s 2007 paper on the petrogenesis of the acapulcoite-lodranite group.

This meteorite is a great example for kids interested in the sciences; as a 12-year-old who knew a little about rocks and even less about meteorites, I got lucky and stumbled across a meteorite that was a) really rare, and b) actually useful for research!  That’s pretty cool.  And I think it really shows that anyone can do it.

1.05 gram main mass

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Scanned photographs:
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