New rules for hunting meteorites Options

[Woody]

Looks like the Feds are stepping up and placing restrictions on collecting meteorites. I recognize the interest and benefit science might have but the way I interpret this means more regulations placed on our public lands and activities. This might be a bit of a rant on my part but I hate all these rules and regulations on our public lands. I am reminded about the last time I was in the California N.F. I wanted to spend a couple of days in the back country camping. I found out that I needed a permit in order to even have a campfire. Here is another extreme, I was in Germany a few years ago and got an annual fishing license. It cost about 100$. However, if you actually wanted to use it you had to go down to the county court house before the last business day, and pay an additional cost for each and every day you planned on fishing. It was about 10$ extra per day.

This kind of suggest the same thing, you can’t go out hunting meteorites unless you buy a permit.



http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/10/15/...intcmp=features

[EMac]

Where are you seeing the $1300 per ton figure? That's the question I had. The rest, I generally agree with; the point being they weren't selling the material for its aesthetic or collector value, but rather as a commodity.

In the link you provided, Brandon Barringer states that the decade following 1909 that his dad was looking for investors to the tune of $500M that rose to $1B based off nickel/platinoid values rising from $50-100 a ton (bottom of pg 187). That's a huge delta from $1300/ton, and I'm trying to reconcile those figures.

Around placer vs lode, I think B. Barringer's comment is interesting (Pg 186 "For safety's sake, lode claims were filed, but not used") as it pertains to our other discussions of lode vs placers and which is appropriate.

Edited punctuation and fixed D. Barringer to be B. Barringer.

[Clay Diggins]

Where are you seeing the $1300 per ton figure? That's the question I had. The rest, I generally agree with; the point being they weren't selling the material for its aesthetic or collector value, but rather as a commodity.

In the link you provided, Brandon Barringer states that the decade following 1909 that his dad was looking for investors to the tune of $500M that rose to $1B based off nickel/platinoid values rising from $50-100 a ton (bottom of pg 187). That's a huge delta from $1300/ton, and I'm trying to reconcile those figures.

Around placer vs lode, I think B. Barringer's comment is interesting (Pg 186 "For safety's sake, lode claims were filed, but not used") as it pertains to our other discussions of lode vs placers and which is appropriate.

Edited punctuation and fixed D. Barringer to be B. Barringer.

I'll have to dig around more to find the $1,300 documentation. It was partially what attracted the interest of Dr. Foote in 1891. Being in the business such valuable material would have been on his radar. He was tipped off by one of the workers at the smelter Volz was sending his shipments to. The rail station at Canyon Diablo was finished in 1886 and Volz took advantage of the cheap transportation to send the meteorite material back to the smelter in Pennsylvania(?) as I recall. Volz became the richest man in Northern Arizona and became famous for the free and open to the public two day party he threw once a year.

I think the $1300 figure may have been in Coon Mountain Controversies or one of Hoyt's other works. If you have a real interest the Lowell Observatory has Mr. Hoyt's many studies in it's collection. Warning: Mr Hoyt really loved the details and his writing style is a bit hard to read for many. I have a lot of material on this particular subject, including Hoyt's, so digging through is a bit of a chore.

Hundreds of the siderites from Canyon Diablo were sent to collectors, museums as well as MIT and other universities for testing. Small specimens were sold by Dr. Foote and can still be found today in the collection boxes he sold at the time. Dr Foote died in 1895 before Barringer was told about the crater in 1901. Barringer himself made the following statement:

Hundreds of such pieces had been shipped from the region in the vicinity of the crater to museums all over the world before we secured possession of the property.

There was a huge public interest in the siderites long before Barringer became involved. They were highly desired by collectors along with the "diamonds" found there. Money was being made long before Barringer became involved.

As for the note about locating lodes over the placers - the 1872 Mining Act makes it clear that lodes discovered within a placer have to be located, claimed, declared and paid for along with the placer before applying for a patent or the lode will be excluded from the placer patent (Section 11).
Barringer invited many geologists, miners and scientists to explore the deposit and being invitees they each had the right to locate a lode should they discover one during their exploration. Barringer would have been remiss and a pretty poor mining lawyer if he had left that possibility open. Clearly he considered the deposit to be a placer. Clearly he was the leading expert on the differences between lode and placer claims. Clearly he didn't want to spend his time and money defending spurious claims while proceeding through the patent process. The lode overclaims were for "safety's sake" just as Brandon Barringer wrote.