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New Nevada Cold Find


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Nice going Lunk, that chondrite has some pretty colors, looks like it's been out there for awhile. 👍 ht

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1 hour ago, Lunk said:

Today found me deep in the Nevada outback, searching for those elusive gold nuggets with my trusty Minelab GPZ 7000. Towards the end of the day, I heard a nice, narrow double target response from the detector, just like the small and shallow sub-gram nuggets make. After pinpointing the target with the edge of the GPZ 14 coil, I plunged my plastic scoop into the loose soil, where it encountered a rock about 3 or 4 inches deep. Removing it from the soil, I immediately noticed that the rock was unusually dense; rubbing the dirt from the stone revealed the familiar rusty tin can color and smooth, regmaglypted surface typical of a weathered chondrite. The stone meteorite  had a couple of broken surfaces, so I carefully searched the area with the detector for more fragments and soon received another double target response that turned out to be another stone at about the same size and depth as the first, and around 8 feet downslope. The two fragments fit together perfectly, just like a jigsaw puzzle. This meteorite is my third  Nevada cold find since 2008. 

Area where the two chondrite fragments were dug, one at just 3 o'clock of the detector coil, and the other at the tip of the scoop handle:BE68DB86-A43D-449F-8A0F-28EB251EE511.thumb.jpeg.f4c58270a78598f094446ba19105bfd9.jpeg

The two fragments reunited, with a total weight of 276 grams:2380FFA2-4D75-46BC-92EB-E40EC9AD821B.thumb.jpeg.7755b7dcc0ac43587f16ff7d49b63fd6.jpeg

 

 

That is freaking awesome!!!!!

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Another grand find for you.

Congrats and good hunting!

Good luck on your next outing.

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10 hours ago, Lunk said:

...Rubbing the dirt from the stone revealed the familiar rusty tin can color and smooth, regmaglypted surface...

You know you're reading/listening to a geologist when a word like that slips out.  :laugh:

A lot of times people get into a rut around here saying if you find a responsive rock that isn't in a known meteorite field (like Gold Basin) that it can't be a meteorite.  You've just shown that isn't true.  There's a chance of finding a meteorite anywhere on the planet.  Chances are miniscule, but then we detectorists lust after recovering rarities, right?  I wonder how many experience those and then decide "chances are against it..." and toss that once-in-a-lifetime find aside.

Do you think you were in an unsearched area or is it likely someone else had a coil over this and decided it was iron trash?

20% of detectorists get 80% of the finds?  You're way more into the tail than simply 20%.

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Good to see you finally broke down and bought a new scoop!

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2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Do you think you were in an unsearched area or is it likely someone else had a coil over this and decided it was iron trash?

That could very well be, since the area is an abandoned gold placer, and the meteorite would have signaled as iron trash for someone using a discriminating detector. But there are no recorded meteorite finds in the area. It certainly pays to be knowledgeable of the physical differences between space rocks and terrestrial hot rocks.

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1 hour ago, Lunk said:

But there are no recorded meteorite finds in the area. It certainly pays to be knowledgeable of the physical differences between space rocks and terrestrial hot rocks.

I've told this story before here so maybe people don't want to read it a second time.  (Too bad...😏)  My parents owned farmland that was located above (as in many hundreds of feet above) an astrobleme.  One summer about 40 years ago some geologists from the University of Kansas came by to study it.   My dad was one of those outgoing people not afraid to strike up a conversation with anyone.  (He'd have done great with permissions if he were a detectorist...).  He invited one of the geologists to our house for dinner and I tagged along.  The geologist mentioned that one of his colleagues was out searching rock piles at the corner of farm fields (where farmers stack them away from their plow and disc blades), looking for meteorites.  The astrobleme was at least 100 million years old so there's no chance any of that meteorite (if any had survived) would have been on the surface, and of course they knew that.

If a professional geologist specializing in meteorites searches random rock piles for meteorites, sounds like they can be anywhere.  But they're still like small needles in very large haystacks.

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