The team wish to thank the South African Heritage Resources Agency for kindly providing a permit to collect any meteorite finds in specific areas, and especially Ms Mary Leslie.

The previous expedition looked at the feasibility of finding meteorites on the permanent dunes, as well as inter-dune erg surfaces. However, it was discovered that the red Kalahari sand dunes were covered completely in a variety of grasses, effectively hiding any rocks that may have been on the surface.

It was further discovered that the interdune areas were not erg surfaces, but were covered with Kalahari red sand, which, itself was vegetated with grasses and small trees. [See previous report].

The search area was therefore defined as dry pan surfaces North of Upington and South of the Kalahari Gemsbok Park.

The specific defined pans were Kaksteenpan and an adjacent large pan known as Koppieskraal pan.

However, local knowledge suggested that we avoid that area as:

[1] there was a busy guest farm on the pan;
[2] which included camel rides across it;
[3] the pans include a 4X4 trail;
[4] a film crew was working one of the pans.

The area searched included sections of Grootaarpan, Kleinaarpan and Vrysoutpan.

Grootaarpan and Kleinaarpan are separated by a narrow strip of Kalahari dune and are surrounded by permanent dunes. This gives rise to fascinating ‘bays’ and ‘promontories’ on the ‘shoreline’.

Grootaarpan was covered with rocks of varying sizes, but interestingly, of local provenance only. The underlying rock was volcanic ash, with surface rocks including some lavas and other volcanics. The Southern end had a protrusion slightly above the mean pan surface with felsic ash containing some xenoliths, as well as secondary pyrite, calcite and quartz crystals.

Kleinaarpan demonstrated fewer rocks on the surface, but of similar type.

Both pans had small areas bulldozed out, which were filled with water, presumably to see if salt would accumulate in commercial quantities.

Vrysoutpan was completely different. It was covered with a white sand, with very few rocks. In one area it had been excavated and several thousand tons of salt was regularly recovered from each excavation at six week intervals for several months of the year.

Vrysoutpan also had thin underlying limonite / goethite deposits, bits of which accumulated around circular features associated with rising water.

A number of highly magnetic dark rocks were recovered from Grootaarpan, which proved on analysis by Wits to be volcanics.

Prof Reimold was asked to comment on whether our unsuccessful returns were close to what real meteorites might look like, or whether we were collecting completely wrong looking rocks.

He placed a sliver of a martian meteorite next to one of the returns and it looked practically identical.

The Spring Expedition 2002 will return to the same area, and details will be published once arrangements have been made.

Prospecting in the data and talking to people may be more effective ways of finding meteorites. Bill Hollenbach advised that a meteorite broke through the roof of a warehouse in George in 1989. This was analysed and found to be an L4 chondrite.

The data is being followed up and if the information proves to be correct, it will be added to the database as Number 50!

If you hear of any meteorites that fell in your area, why not investigate and provide any information you discovered?

There may be others that somehow missed getting added to the database.

We could really be searching for South Africa’s one hundred and fiftieth meteorite!

Again, if you have a digital camera [or an ordinary camera and access to a scanner], we need images of meteorites in local museums and institutions, together with data about the museum and the meteorite. If you can help the project, we’d love to know about it.