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The Power of Zed on Meteorites

14 May 2015
Find of
the Month

Early on Friday morning May 8th I left Los Angeles at 3 AM for a 5 hour drive to the meteorite strewn field of Franconia, Arizona. This is a trip that I have made many times over the years mostly using my GPX 5000. This was my first trip with the GPZ 7000 (Zed) and I was anxious to see it perform. I was with my wife and she was using a Gold Bug Pro within a short distance of all of my finds. Did I say finds? It did not take long from the beginning of the hunt before I was getting the shallow targets. The targets are located within an area that has been extensively hunted over the years by hundreds of meteorite hunters. None of them are over a couple of inches. Most of the trash and thousands of the meteorites have been removed over the years. My previous trips had yielded me no more than 3 'irons' in this area for the day.

An iron is a small meteorite that resulted from a larger meteor having burst and the shower of particles which came down are mostly iron in composition. They stick fiercely to a magnet. It is essential to have a magnet to locate the tiny finds. It did not take long before I was using the Zed to find these iron meteorites near previously found targets. The patina of the desert pavement shows digs and scratches easily. It was actually a good clue to hunt an area harder because the Zed could find smaller irons than any other detector.

It did not take long before I had set myself a new record for iron finds. What was really amazing was finding the smalls. I don't have a scale small enough to measure the weight of 80% of them. I know I ended up with 25 irons that weigh a total of 4.1 grams. The largest one at the top of the circle weighs .8 grams. While diligently searching for several hours for the irons I was further rewarded with two much larger meteorites which are not normally found in this area. One find is 46.7 grams and the other is 114.4 grams.

My wife did a good job of slowing down and getting 6 irons with her Gold Bug Pro. We knew there were targets to be found because I was getting them easily. Without the Zed we may have given up the hunt because there would have been so few targets. I believe I'm the first one to take a Zed to this part of the strewn field. It might be safe to say that there will not be any detectable irons left after the Zed has been used there for a few years.

 

Mitchel – CA, USA

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