Fun adventure! Good camera work! Don't know how you got out for anything in AZ during July, I think every day that month was over 100! Looking forward to your next video.
Summer means longer daylight and more sun when it's high in the sky, so less shadows. Makes a big difference, usually find 30-50% more than winter days. The heat is annoying but definitely prefer summer to winter. Just have to bring a lot of water and be safe..
great video, always wanted to try hunt for space rocks. i went to a goodwill while back and bought a collapsible walking stick for blind people and i put a huge magnet i carry that as a back up but primarily use a detector.
Are these all from the 1912 fall? How can you be sure? That's over a century and yet they look like they were just placed there yesterday. The ones out on the dried up mud flats especially.
Complicated question. Big falls like Holbrook (Arizona, 1912), Pultusk (Poland, 1868), and Chelyabinsk (Russia, 2013), each produced ~millions of tiny ~peas, due to how they broke up in the atmosphere. Meteorites are usually pretty rare - if you magnet-dragged a bunch of anthills in the open desert, you wouldn't find any meteorites. The areas with the densest concentrations of meteorites in the world are either the oldest, driest static surfaces like the Atacama or Namib deserts, or areas where meteorites have been naturally accumulated, like some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet where the ice slows and evaporates, or the edges of certain dry lakes that have been ~scraped clean by winter ice. The terrain at Holbrook is pretty active dunes and river bottom. It's young, and honestly horrible for meteorite preservation / hunting, and the only reason we find anything at all is the huge number of stones from the 1912 fall, most of which are buried and will never be found. If that fall hadn't happened there, we wouldn't be finding anything. And everything we've found does look to be pretty similar - a friable, low-iron chondrite with white matrix and big grey chondrules, that weathers to a mottled rusty brown. I can't rule out that we haven't happened to pick up something else in the field, but it's unlikely given the terrain. Many of the anthills are loaded with shale from buried tin cans, bits of rounded metal from welding / railroad trash, and stuff like that - it's not an old surface. And the chance that something else fell there since 1912 is...astronomically small. Good question, appreciate it.
Holbrook is an L/LL chondrite, which has just around ~10% iron by volume. The tiny stones wouldn't register on most detectors, and there's also a lot of buried man-made trash in the area - the river bottom there parallels the railroad and there used to be houses all around. Lots of bullets, old cans, junk.. We've metal detected elsewhere, and it can definitely make sense, but I think hunting by sight here is much more productive.
Thanks so much for posting! Fun and educational and I liked the up close and personal commentary on your finds! Can't wait for the next video!
Loved the ant bed hack. Really good hunt. Really enjoyed ❤
Nice new Trip, keep hunting 💪🏻
Love to watch.
Greets from Germany 🇩🇪
Fun adventure! Good camera work! Don't know how you got out for anything in AZ during July, I think every day that month was over 100! Looking forward to your next video.
Summer means longer daylight and more sun when it's high in the sky, so less shadows. Makes a big difference, usually find 30-50% more than winter days. The heat is annoying but definitely prefer summer to winter. Just have to bring a lot of water and be safe..
great video, always wanted to try hunt for space rocks. i went to a goodwill while back and bought a collapsible walking stick for blind people and i put a huge magnet i carry that as a back up but primarily use a detector.
That sounds like a good idea. Probably much more durable than the canes we're using. Will see if I can't find one to experiment with.
Aren't you glad ants just chuck these things out of their holes and not try to cash in their first to find! LOL
Are these all from the 1912 fall? How can you be sure? That's over a century and yet they look like they were just placed there yesterday. The ones out on the dried up mud flats especially.
Complicated question. Big falls like Holbrook (Arizona, 1912), Pultusk (Poland, 1868), and Chelyabinsk (Russia, 2013), each produced ~millions of tiny ~peas, due to how they broke up in the atmosphere.
Meteorites are usually pretty rare - if you magnet-dragged a bunch of anthills in the open desert, you wouldn't find any meteorites. The areas with the densest concentrations of meteorites in the world are either the oldest, driest static surfaces like the Atacama or Namib deserts, or areas where meteorites have been naturally accumulated, like some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet where the ice slows and evaporates, or the edges of certain dry lakes that have been ~scraped clean by winter ice.
The terrain at Holbrook is pretty active dunes and river bottom. It's young, and honestly horrible for meteorite preservation / hunting, and the only reason we find anything at all is the huge number of stones from the 1912 fall, most of which are buried and will never be found. If that fall hadn't happened there, we wouldn't be finding anything.
And everything we've found does look to be pretty similar - a friable, low-iron chondrite with white matrix and big grey chondrules, that weathers to a mottled rusty brown.
I can't rule out that we haven't happened to pick up something else in the field, but it's unlikely given the terrain. Many of the anthills are loaded with shale from buried tin cans, bits of rounded metal from welding / railroad trash, and stuff like that - it's not an old surface. And the chance that something else fell there since 1912 is...astronomically small.
Good question, appreciate it.
Why not use a metal detector?
Holbrook is an L/LL chondrite, which has just around ~10% iron by volume. The tiny stones wouldn't register on most detectors, and there's also a lot of buried man-made trash in the area - the river bottom there parallels the railroad and there used to be houses all around. Lots of bullets, old cans, junk..
We've metal detected elsewhere, and it can definitely make sense, but I think hunting by sight here is much more productive.