Rock hunters drive up price of meteorites
BEIJING: A spike in meteorite prices has turned many Chinese into treasure hunters after a blazing fireball illuminated the night sky in Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture, Yunnan province.
Videos by witnesses posted online show chondrites – stony non-metallic meteorites – the size of table tennis balls.
Jiang Wei, a meteorite expert from the China Association for Scientific Expedition, said they found several meteorites in the prefecture’s Manlun village, with two crashing through the clay roof of a village house last Friday evening.
He said some of the bigger chondrites weighed between 500g and 600g.
By Monday night, about 200 chondrites had been found and several have been sent to the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences for further study.
With scientists and collectors both looking for the difficult-to-find “fallen stones”, the price of chondrites has hit 2,000 yuan (RM1,243) a gram.
“The chondrite will provide scientific research value, and should not be taken as a special good that is overpriced in the market,” said Zhang Xingxiang, director of Yunnan Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He said the overpriced chondrites might be a result of speculation – usually a gram of chondrite is priced at no more than 100 yuan (RM62).
The local government released a notice on Monday saying that the value of chondrites is for scientific research and the hope of getting rich overnight through collecting chondrites should not be encouraged.
Meteorites are sometimes recovered on the ground after fireball sightings.
Last year in Yunnan’s Shangri-La, a meteor shower drove up the price of meteorites on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao.com to as much as 30,000 yuan (RM18,651) a gram. — China Daily/Asia News Network