Passage 2 - The international meteorite market

Reading Passage

The international meteorite market

How space rocks are marketed around the globe

A

At 2 a.m. on 18 July, 2011, inhabitants of the Draa valley in southern Morocco witnessed a ball of fire streak across the sky, followed by a series of sonic booms. Scientists soon established that this was a meteorite, and what is more, that it came from Mars. Such meteorites fall to Earth extremely infrequently and the Moroccan meteorite - which was named Tissint after a village near where it landed - was particularly exciting because of the excellent condition it was in.

"It is as if it was blasted off Mars yesterday," says Dr Caroline Smith, Meteorite Curator at the Natural History Museum in London, where the largest Tissint fragment is now located. But the institution's path to purchasing the fragment embodies some of the oddities of the international meteorite market.

B

As our sole source of non-microscopic space material, meteorites have much to teach us. "We are still building a catalogue of everything that is out there," says Dr Ralph P. Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University in the USA. "Meteorite science is where biology was 200 years ago with people saying, 'Oh, here is a strange, long-necked beast, I wonder if it is related to the turtle?'" Yet scientists do not necessarily get first choice of the meteorites that plummet to Earth. "There is a market out there that treats these meteorites as collectibles, almost as though they were fine art," Dr Harvey explains.

The market value of meteorites began to rise in the late 1990s. Some attribute this to the advent of online businesses, which made meteorites easily available to the public. But collector Darryl Pitt, curator of the largest collection of meteorites in the world, known as the Macovich Collection, attributes it to several headline-grabbing purchases whose steep prices were unprecedented.

At a New York City auction in 1998, a single slice of a meteorite sold for a record-breaking $137,000. Weeks later, another meteorite was sold for $97,000. "Word was being disseminated throughout the world about the high prices that meteorites were attaining," says Pitt, who put both samples up for sale. "This served as a catalyst for a new generation of meteorite hunters."

C

Eric Twelker is an online meteorite retailer who purchases meteorites from dealers around the world. When asked how he determines the legality of the meteorites he purchases, Twelker pauses. "There is some degree of concern," he says. "To a large extent - and I would say this is for dealers and institutions, as well - the question of legality is not asked or it is not pursued."

The law governing meteorite acquisition is diffuse. Every country has its own way of determining meteorite ownership. In Switzerland, meteorites are the property of the government - but the finder is compensated with a sum of money suitable to the value of the object. In India, Denmark, and most Australian states, meteorites must be handed over to a museum. If you stumble upon a space rock in Japan, however, finders-keepers applies.

Twelker acknowledges that many meteorites are "probably exported illegally", and that some institutions have chosen not to purchase meteorites from certain regions as a result. The Natural History Museum, for example, only purchases meteorites that have documentation giving all the relevant details. "The institutions that have taken the so-called 'principled' point of view have found themselves left in the dust by people who did not," says Twelker.

D

Yet Twelker insists that the interests of science and private collection are not at odds. Collectors typically have meteorites listed publicly by the Meteoritical Society in an abstract that describes the sample's geochemical qualities and where it was found on Earth, among other characteristics. "It is basically a label of authenticity," says Twelker. To get listed, collectors have to give a sample to a reputable researcher, who will analyse it free of charge and submit his or her analysis to the Meteoritical Society. "The availability of meteorites is much greater than when I started this business - and one of the reasons is that there is a major financial incentive to go out and get them," Twelker points out.

E

Approximately 5,000-17,000 meteorites plummet to Earth every year - some the size of a washing machine, some as small as a golf ball. But when a scientifically valuable example like Tissint lands, institutions must contend with private collectors for the prize. "We are competing within a commercial market, although we have extremely limited finances," says Dr Smith. "There is a danger in the price hiking of the market. Institutions without much money to purchase things may be priced out."

The Tissint meteorite was sold to the Natural History Museum in the UK by Pitt and Dave Gheesling, another collector. "We could have made a lot more money," says Pitt. "There are a lot of private collectors in Asia and the Middle East that would have paid far more." Asked why he and Gheesling chose to sell it to the museum, Pitt answers: "There exists a social obligation to make the extraordinary accessible. I would not have been able to sleep at night knowing that this object was in someone's private vault."

Nevertheless, the sum exceeded the museum's annual budget. Half of the money was put up by an anonymous philanthropist with a keen interest in the museum's collection. Does a reliance on deep-pocketed donors spell doom for the meteorite collections of museums and other educational institutions? Dr Smith does not think so: "There are enough good guys out there who are very generous when it comes to selling stones to institutions, or providing material for free."